skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Evil is a BS theological notion. I wish people would stop perpetuating it.

You can call it by other names, and you do; mentally ill for example. Yet, there is no rational objective reason to declare anything wrong, evil or whatever; not even the extinction of all life in the universe, or torture for all. There is no "objective evil" any human could declare, it boils down to opinions; so I make up my own mind. Deal with that, not with strawmen.

More to the point, nobody calls the leaders of the allies evil, despite they having done equally abominable actions, like killing 250.000 civillians (men, women, elderly, children, babies, kittens et al) with two nuclear bombs, or bombing hundreds of thousands of civillians in Dresden to shreds. But they are not called "evil", because they were on "our" side

No, because that was in response to a huge campaign to conquer Europe (let's ignore the death camps and whatnot for a moment). I am German, and I would laugh into the face of any German crying about Dresden. All things considered, Germany was treated a thousand times better than it deserved during and after the war. You haven't been to a whole lot of historical museums dealing with the topic, have you? Or seen movies, that kind of thing? Anyone who murdered and ultimately defeated Nazis was on my side, no quotes needed. I know the allies were and are full of crap as well, and did and do plenty of evil (my subjective idea of it, get it?) things, but in the case of the Nazis, no response could have been too brutal. I would not say this about other dictators, but "as a German" that's how I feel about the Nazis, who weren't just horrible to Germans and German Jews, but to all of Europe. But that doesn't mean I buy into any dichotomy making the Allies holy or something. Just that I'm glad they were stopped somehow, seeing how shamefully Germany handled herself.

it's not like they enjoyed killing people (as is probably the understanding of naive people calling them 'evil')

No, that's just a strawman. Fact is, they didn't mind. In my books that's enough.

Part of the massacres were result of the inevitable power plays in huge countries with hundreds of millions population under a revolution

Let's grant that; what about the other parts? The personality cults? How convenient to tell me what I think and then refute it.. and I feel kinda bad because all of this is off-topic to begin, but I couldn't let this slide.
Ask HN: Work Around for passing C Pointers
hey, I'm wondering if there's a way to get the ptr to a caller of a function from within the called function in c (without passing in the ptr as an arg). Basically, I've been experimenting on how to do oop style programming in c, so any ideas or suggestions here are more than welcome :) Here's an example to help clear things up.

struct Person {
char name[32];
char * (*setName)( struct Person *, const char *);
};

char *setName( struct Person *self, const char *name) {
strcpy(self->name, name );
}

int main(void) {
struct Person *p = (struct Person *)malloc(sizeof(struct Person));
p->setName = &setName;

// here I'd really like to not have to pass the ptr 'p'
// is there any way to do this?
p->setName(p, "John Doe");
}

Thanks in advance!
I think developers like to declare winners for very, very good reasons typically. Winners are often very useful. For example in settling on a standard once a good or great solution is found so a community can thrive around it, lots of open tools and open code can be built for it, developers can build upon it with a roadmap in mind, sites can publish with it knowing they can reach a maximum audience, etc etc etc etc.

Who really wants to have even a dozen different 'standards' for data interchange? The gradual move from XML to JSON demonstrated perfectly well how messy it can all get, just trying to support two quasi standards.
Please note that this is (hopefully) only a temporary aberration and that it will be changed following the next election.
I need a super cold beer....
NY Times article on Github
I don't understand why a sizeable part HN is in thrall to nutjobs when it comes to food.

I don't mind the people saying "Food is probably complicated and we don't have much information about it"; but the amount of anecdote and pure nonsense that comes out on almost any thread about food is depressing.

> Salt bad, sugar bad, wheat bad, fitness is a lie

Hyperbole and link-bait titles. Too much salt is probably bad; too much sugar (a 2 litre soda is not a single serving and people who drink 64 ounce sodas should expect it to be harmful) is probably bad; doing no exercise[1] is worse than doing some exercise.

[1] Some people do remarkably little exercise - they have sedentary jobs; they don't move around at home; they drive everywhere and park close to where they need, etc.
At a guess it is to give us three chances to upvote him. There is a possible downside to that strategy.
They also use lots of other fats, and lots of salt, and lots of sugar.

They use it because it's tasty.

"Supersize Me" on Haute Cuisine would have similar catastrophic results, but be considerably more expensive.
For the record I don't like sports.

In the time we gave that question, being a fan of sports did not generally help on that question. The necessary domain information is small, the relational design skills tested are not.

In fact we had one candidate who said up front that he didn't know anything about sports. He wound up doing well on that question and being hired.
To be fair though, there really are enough skilled graphic designers around - especially in the cities.

Software developers on the other hand...
Ok, how about the fact that we've halved extreme poverty since the 1990?
Or the worldwide increase of life expectancy (Africa's average almost reached 55 this year)? AIDS and malaria are both in decline.
And apparently we accomplished the decade with least deaths in war in the last century.

I don't know if i would call this a golden age, but we are seeing improvements in more than technology.
" Zigbee are "better" technically - but they are 50-100 per socket vs 10-20. "

Again - way off base here - please do your homework. A plug-in on-off socket can be had for under $30 (http://www.ebay.com/itm/Wayne-Dalton-HA-02WD-Wireless-Small-...). The cheap 433MHz argument goes out the window very quickly if you know what you're doing.
This works fine for e.g. sodas, but sadly all foods heavy in carbohydrates (pizza, pasta, bread, ...) will be broken down into sugars :(

That being said, there are tons of paleo/keto blogs out there offering alternatives (e.g. coliflower pizza http://www.onegoodthingbyjillee.com/2012/08/the-astonishing-...). The sad part is that things like lettuce wrapped burgers are still hard to find when not cooking at home.

Also: I'd love to see more stevia-sweetened things rather than aspartame sweetened ones
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame_controversy
'Snow Fall' Tells a Story About an Avalanche and a Newspaper's Digital Progress
fear of never before consumed substances which have no history of safe use seems like the wisest thing to me. Limited tests can miss a lot, right?
The ‘What Others Are Doing’ Trap
School is a great place to train people to do all sorts of things - software use included.

It can be more useful to train students in commercial software if they are ubiquitous everywhere else. For example, in a graphic design course, one would teach students to use Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, etc. It would be detrimental to train them in GIMP and Inkscape, as aside from these software being substandard for serious use, hardly anyone uses them. Whereas showing someone how to use even the older CS2 version of Photoshop, these skills will transfer easily to the latest CS6.
He got replies to each response which is vaguely disappointing.

I'm not sure how the HN "anti down vote rampage" works - if I downvote all three posts do all my downvotes count? Or is there something that detects I'm downvoting 'too many' posts by a single user and silently drops some of my downvotes?
To all of HN, I am really sorry I brough Mao up. "Do whatever it takes to get what I want" reminded me of that essay bit, but I had no idea it would devolve into this :/ Consider this a lesson learned. It's just not worth it when that stuff isn't the actual topic.
Software Engineering Best Practices from a General of the Tirthy Years' War
Ask HN: Feedback about HN itself. What do you think?
I like the content of this site, but I also have a few suggestions, based on a few months as a regular visitor:

1) Make internal links smarter. If I read a page for 10 minutes and then click "next" I often get an error. Not an error page. Just the error text. I actually got this error when trying to submit this post.

2) Please implement a "collapse" button on all 1st-level comments. In big conversations I want to skip to the next comment when I am not interested. I don't want to scroll slowly down the page to find it.

3) Please add a "Show" tab to the main navigation, similar to "Ask". If anybody needs a little extra exposure, it's the people who are releasing new stuff.

4) Make the voting buttons bigger, and allow "undo". I think you'll agree that "tiny disappearing buttons" doesn't have that "awesome UX" ring to it. Especially when they are the primary user action that fuels the function of the site.

5) I see that "saved stories" is a possibility in my profile, but I have yet to find the button/link that allows me to save stories. Does it exist?

6) You're gonna hate this one, but I really wish there was a way to see when someone has replied to my comments. i.e. — Notifications. I would gladly sacrifice the "threads" and "comments" pages for a tab that has something similar but only relevant to me.

7) Does karma have any effect on anything, or is it just gamification? I can't see the scores of comments or people in context, therefore they are useless to me. My own karma points have more use as a notification (if it goes up, something happened) than anything else. If karma creates influence... a little info somewhere would be awesome (in my "dashboard" maybe?).

Thank you.
Just an update, it turns out that Typed Arrays aren't as fast as node's Buffer implementation. When comparing msgpack-js-browser to the native JSON library, JSON is way faster in chrome. http://jsperf.com/msgpack-js-vs-json

However, in the number and array heavy case, the msgpack is 2.5x smaller when serialized. So even if it's a bit slower in browsers, the bandwidth savings and the ability to store binary data may still be worth it. (remember that performance in the browser scales very differently since it's distributed across all your client's browsers)
I think the only place for these presentations is where you're not physically giving the talk. In most cases, simple cuts or dissolves between slides is fine, since like you said, none of this actually adds much to the presentation.
1) Yes. People who were proficient in Office 2003 needed special training to use Office 2007. There's a real cost to switching tools.

2) Holy cow, that's a loaded argument: "Use Linux or people will starve!!!"

3) Agreed.

4) Fully agreed.
Ted Nelson’s Bucket Course: ‘Cinema of the Mind’
This is so true. I spent tons of time in US supermarkets searching for bread that is not sweet. The regular sweet bread is only good for toasts with honey, or sandwiches with Nutella or something similar, I couldn't stand eating it with ham or cheese.
Enforcing that a quote has at least one quote_line is pretty tough, at least in Postgres, and involves triggers and locks.

How do you enforce that two transactions don't delete the last quote_line at the same time?

And how would you enforce that the sum of the quote_lines is correct with multiple writers?

Not saying it can't be done easily, but I'd love to hear how.
Really? You think the tobacco industry was doing nothing wrong and the evil socialist came around and attacked them for some socialist agenda?
La senda Dvd-rip
> "I don't really want anything"

Congratulations. You won.
What kind of use case is "scribble some notes on a screenshot?" If I want to talk about the contents of a screenshot, I'll just type in a note along with the email. Even with the S-Pen, handwriting isn't really legible unless you write awkwardly slow.
I grew up on a no soda no candy diet enforced by my parents. Carob Easter Bunnies were a bit harsh, but otherwise I am better of for it. I was once forced to return some HoHos I had bought myself. While carding seems a bit extreme it is not far off and does not infringe on the civil liberties of a child. There are lots of rights children don't have because of the responsibility they require. I think sugar falls within the realm of a child being unable to make the right decision of it's proper consumption amount.
Mátalos suavemente Dvd-Screener
It's been a while since I was making bread regularly, but I don't think I've ever seen a bread recipe that didn't include sugar. I was under the impression that yeast must eat _something_ in order to make the dough rise.

edit: It looks like my mother has found some, but neither one of us really understands how rising works in these cases.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/28/github-has-big-drea...
If it really does lead to obesity and the connected illnesses, treatment will indirectly take money away from all of the other people with the same insurance company.

Then again, you might not take back as much of your retirement fund :)

I guess ?once/if? insurance companies start charging premiums for people with a diet high in sugar/carbs, this will become a more interesting conversation.
Looks quite good, but seems buggy on my retina macbook. First time I started it I couldn't click anything. Second time I started it I tried maximizing, which turned the screen white, had to quite again. Now I'll try for a 3rd time... ;-)
I started the slow carb diet last year for new years resolution. At the time I was addicted to peanut M&M's. Took probably 3-4 months to completely rid myself of the temptations to eat a large bag of them. Anyways, in addition to that time period I can remember the first week of the diet feeling the need for a piece of bread. I was like feigning for it. But I resisted. Definitely surgars have withdrawal symptoms, but with so many different foods and drinks out there I do think its an easier addiction to cure than any drug like alcohol or tobacco or even heroine for that matter.
I do think bots can be a great part of software development. I love the likes of travisci and codeclimate integrating with GitHub - GitHub just need to build a better app to deal with them. I assume private repos don't have bots bothering them, but maybe they want to allow some? Checkboxes for types of bot services you would like to allow per project?
Please do more research. I've done it. That being said, I am sure I got VERY little carbs from cabbage, cucumbers, olives, avocado, and onions (the usual vegetables I got, and it was usually only for dinner)

A usual day would go like this

Breakfast: Eggs + Butter + Bacon and Coffe with either 40% fat cream or coconut oil and butter.

Lunch: Not hungry, if I am, I usually have some avocado.

Dinner: Beef with butter on top, spring onions and slices cabbage and some avocado

You sound either uneducated on the subject or educated with old data. Get some more recent studies under your belt. There are many swedish ultra marathon or tri-athletes who compete on LCHF. Not sure about foreign ones.

Please do more research, if you think I was joking.
New York City Mayor blames iPhones for increase in crime
> Why do we always want to declare a winner?

You are right. But I came to that page after reading about a faster and smaller JSON at HN, thus I was expecting to find a faster and smaller JSON.

It's just another case of bad marketing hurting a brand.
Just to mention a test I did, sweeteners decreases your ketone levels. Your body is expecting sugar. That's why most people who drink (diet) cokes usually want chips and other carb food as well.
There seems to be a pretty fatal flaw in MessagePack that doesn't exist in [BCD]ER. MessagePack doesn't explicitly represent strings and only provides a binary data type.

Besides not being able to distinguish between a true binary blob and a string, the two parties need to agree on what string encoding should be used. Is it UTF-8, UCS-2, EBCDIC? I suspect this would create tons of incompatibilities between implementations as various parties make their own naive assumptions about what strings are encoded with.

That seems like a pretty major flaw to me. X.690 is a bit overly complicated (there are 10+ string types...) but there is such a thing as too simple.
And for an alternate viewpoint - https://secure.huffingtonpost.com/david-katz-md/sugar-health...

"So while fructose as an ingredient excessively engineered into processed foods is, indeed, a problem- I find it far-fetched at best to suggest the native composition of, say, berries is "evil." Lustig seems to be tossing out the the strawberries with the soda. You find me the person who can blame obesity or diabetes on eating strawberries, and I will give up my day job and become a hula dancer."
Why Facebook Makes Us Depressed
Interestingly, in Firefox, the gap is smaller, their typed array implementation is a bit faster. For the number heavy case, msgpack is only 47% slower which is close enough in performance for a great many use cases.
Bingo Card Creator (and other stuff) Year in Review 2012
He was asking: why should he learn Scala?

Getting hired by any of these companies can be a good enough reason for some.
Indeed. But A-0 isn't what we'd call a "compiler" today. It was a gradual evolution from Holberton's work (1948? 1949?) through A-0 in 1952, up to, say, 1957, when the first optimizing FORTRAN compiler was shipped, which is definitely what we would call a compiler today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_compiler_writing#Fi...
The parent you are responding to isn't denying climate change, just that events like Sandy or Katrina are caused by it. Saying "you can't pick and choose" is trying to have a different discussion.
I disagree with secure boot on regular desktops but I'm not sure how I feel about it on ARM devices (specifically tablets). I feel like the only people who are going to change the OS on a tablet are geeks - it won't affect ordinary consumers who won't want to change the OS especially as tablet hardware and software is so integrated.

Is it possible to hack this or will it even affect geeks who do want to install the OS of their choice?
There was a great video on this by Microsoft Research- basically, you have to get the lag down to 1ms for it to feel like you're really writing or moving a physical object. The iPhone 5 is 23ms according to a quick Google.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/9/2856795/microsoft-high-perf...
Technically, the only ingredients required to make bread are flour, yeast, salt and water.

Active dry yeast will proof just fine without sugar, just a little more slowly. But sugar does increase the yeast's activity. This can be useful when you are trying to revive common active dry yeast from its freeze-dried stupor.
Okay, after starting it for the 3rd time and not maximizing the app I could interact with the gui for a while. But then I clicked on Top-Level-Element Audio and couldn't click anything else anymore afterwards... By the way, trying to resize the window has the same effect like clicking fullscreen: The window area becomes mostly white with some grey rectangles in it. Only fix is to quit...
Nice article. I think young scientists (I'm attributing myself to one of them) should contribute more to open/closed software. It allows to gain experience and also citation count ;)
Thanks for bringing this up. I'd messed up the instructions for that bit and placed the sudo command in the wrong place.Updated it now. For anyone stuck this is the updated instructions work:

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ git clone https://github.com/njh/perl-net-sdp.git perl-net-sdp
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ cd perl-net-sdp
pi@raspberrypi ~/perl-net-sdp $ perl Build.PL
pi@raspberrypi ~/perl-net-sdp $ sudo ./Build
pi@raspberrypi ~/perl-net-sdp $ sudo ./Build test
pi@raspberrypi ~/perl-net-sdp $ sudo ./Build install
pi@raspberrypi ~/perl-net-sdp $ cd ..
> why a sizeable part HN is in thrall to nutjobs when it comes to food

A sizable part of HN worships at the alter of the pursuit of extreme efficiency. It seems to lend itself to jumping from one fad to another to squeeze out whatever iota of perceived benefit they wish to measure themselves by.

Another part is simply related to peoples superiority complexes, a complex that is strong in programmers but by no means limited to them. They've become better than you programming, so they see themselves as better than you in everything. People like that just can't stay away from secret knowledge that you don't know. In this case secret knowledge about the way the human body works.
Ah! That makes sense, as inflation rate computations, in the end, are somewhat/largely/almost entirely subjective.

What's today's equivalent of the $800 20 inch CRT television set of 1990? A 40 inch LCD tv? With ($700) or without ($500) 3D? Or maybe a television and a $600 tablet?

So, it looks like a disagreement about the way to calculate inflation, with the challenger shouting hard, as he should, since it is the only way to make an impression.

If the challenger's arguments have merit, I guess the statitics bureau will slowly react by incorporating them into their computations. 'Slowly', IMO, is a virtue here. These computation methods should be designed by committee.
MailTabs for Mail.app source code is for sale
No, actually, Darcs is not, it only looks like it is.
Again, unless it's recording key strokes and line changes you actually made in the editor, it's still just approximating what happened with a text diff algorithm that doesn't know what you actually did, and is figuring it out after the fact.

Besides not having the goal of figuring out what changed, they often are heuristic and give up (IE they stop trying to align the original files, and just say "removed here, added there").
A bot which does lossless compression on images in open source projects and only submits a pull request (with all the relevant details) if there was a > X percent filesize savings? That's not spam, that's just helpful...
No, you can't do blame without the diffs.
Bram is proposing not attempting to figure out the actual lineage of a line, but instead, when there are multiple possible answers, pick one.
I f*cking love Tech
the whole premise to me is that the man uses a dream that spreads like a virus _to make people go mad_ which is not quite the same as implanting a single idea.

It's the same difference as having a virus that changes behaviour (e.g. switch which hand people use best) and the black plague: while technically they may be the same thing I wouldn't equate them.

I guess this highlights how things are susceptible to interpretation, thanks for taking time to answer.
Really? I urge you to try again. The majority of what people will use in a word processor is there. Why do you think google docs has caught on? Because your average office person doesn't need too many bells and whistles. In any case, even I am hard pressed to find things that libreoffice doesn't do these days.
thanks for the share but I dont think this is the right place :D
Why was this article suddenly de-ranked? It was on the front page, and literally 10 seconds later it is on page 3. Is there some kind of rule that this article violated? Who makes this decision? Why is there not any transparency on if an article is de-ranked and why?
All I am saying is that go ahead and do something about it. Stop preaching to the people who don't believe you and don't agree with your outlook.

If your way is truly better then it should give better results. If it gives better results then you will do more good via paying more taxes and helping people out. Lead by an example. Don't lament old ways, make us want to follow in your path.

That is all I am proposing and all my other arguments are just that arguments for the sake of truth as I personally see it.