skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'll bet on each tweet I sent out once.

Why so cautious? If facebook gets caught doing any of this stuff they're going to implode like a balloon you should stick all your savings on put options. The infinite downside should not concern you since you are so sure that they will do all this and presumably more.
Open office and Libre office are still not on par with commercial offerings. Linux is it's own barrier to entry at the current time.
That benchmark you referenced has nothing but strings for it's data. That's not msgpack's strong point. Do another benchmark with nothing but small integers and arrays and you'll find msgpack kicks json's tail in both cpu usage and bandwidth, even when comparing the native JSON.parse with my pure javascript msgpack implementation using typed arrays.
The Web We Gained
Is was a fun project actually. https://github.com/creationix/msgpack-js-browser
From the article:

> Statistics Canada issued a response... saying the
> agency follows international guidelines and practices.
> Given that Canadian productivity is frequently compared
> with that of the U.S., the methodology behind the
> estimates for Canada “should be comparable to the
> largest extent possible to that used by the U.S.
> Bureau of Labour Statistics,” said Wulong Gu of
> Statscan’s economic analysis division.
>"development for development's sake"? Development doesn't happen for its own sake. It's about improving the quality of human life and alleviating suffering.

No, it's not. It's mostly about making money. No business cares about "improving the quality of human life and alleviating suffering" (they might pay lip service to that on their brochures though). Shareholders don't care about "alleviating suffering", only about return of investment.

>If you had to carry water a few miles each day, or gather firewood to keep you warm in the winter or were infected by tuberculosis, you might welcome a little development.

And yet, _billions_ of people continue to do that, and _billions_ of people die from deceases that technology has eradicated for us half a century or more ago, and development goes on to other stuff, like --to name but a few-- faster smartphones, game consoles, pet food and bling jewellery.

(I don't mean "development" as in the "scientific development" either. I mean it as business development, the idea that production, sales, whatever must continuously expand. I'd be OK with scientific development put directly in the help of humanity, like, say, AIDS drugs sold at cost in Africa instead of pricing them for profit).
> I am pretty sure there aren't any lossless video codecs out there

Oh, there are a lot.
Back when I still recorded TV from an analog capture card I e.g. used http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffyuv

I also recall http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSU_Lossless_Video_Codec and http://lags.leetcode.net/codec.html having a userbase.

When looking at newer codecs, Dirac has a "pro" mode that is lossless (http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/projects/dirac/diracpro.shtml) and so do x264 and SNOW (http://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?title=SNOW)
works on my FF18 on Linux, but the animation center is on top of the window instead of the middle.
to bad the mime-type for .mp4 is text/plain.
if it would be video/mp4, chrome would just play the videos in the browser.
Pinterest Down | getting {{ 502 }} error
Free TFS hosting from Microsoft
Most likely mistakes were made when calculating inflation rates. This is actually a pretty easy thing to do and will easily go unnoticed.

As evidence that this can occur, consider the US - inflation was known to be overstated by 1.3%/year before 1996.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boskin_Commission

We probably do better by now, but there are still fairly well known upward biases in our inflation calculations. For example, consider the lack of hedonic adjustments to medical care in CPI. If an laparoscopic surgery today costs more than living in pain in 1970, the BLS counts the cost increase in "medical care" as inflation.

http://www.bls.gov/cpi/cpihqaitem.htm
They missed out on the continuing merger of state mass-surveillance and corporate mass-surveillance. That's IMHO one of the biggest stories.
Tumblr too.
Chinese Hackers exploiting Internet Explorer Zero Day vulnerability
"I've looked at Scala. I think it's really neat. I think it is Perl."

Or C++. Brilliant programmers will undoubtedly do brilliant things with it, but for a lot of folks, the word "multiparadigm" might as well read "radioactive." It's true (as someone above noted) that you can use a useful subset of the language and discard the rest, but weak programmers seldom choose correctly, and so we're left with steaming piles of spaghetti everywhere.

Ten years ago, I would have been thrilled reading Odersky's book. Nowadays, I die a little inside every time I see the phrases "language feature" and "syntactic sugar" in a language manual.
>Enlighten me then, when was golden age of human history then in your opinion?

Ever occurred to you that it might be in the future?

Or that human history was perpetually in the same state of mess? Good for a few, a nightmare for others?

Or that "good for humanity" and technological advancements are not necessarily the same thing, and that e.g living an agrarian life in some 18th century farm could be better for someone than living as an industrial worker in a highly modern Foxconn factory, despite increased odds of dying from a decease preventable today or having to get your water from the well?

Damn, I'd take living in the sixties to living in the '00s any day of the week, despite having to let go of my iPad.

>I have a problem with you new age romantics, bitching about issues of current civilization without providing alternatives or even realizing what "reversing" current state of affairs would really mean.

When there's a problem, like a cancer, you need to remove the cancer. You don't need an "alternative" to it.

Also, I'm not sure how to read the part about not realising what "reversing the current state of affairs would really mean".

Who said anything about "reversing"? There's a lot we can do without reversing anything. Stoping the market craze is not the same as "reversing" progress or anything. Not to mention that progress != building more advanced things cheaper.
How to Annoy Your Community and Ruin Your Brand’s Reputation in the Process
I totally agree with the flash analogy. All the bouncing balls and fancy pattern animations shown as "cutting edge css animations" have already been done with flash in 1999. History repeating? I use css3, js, canvas, sometimes mic and camera via js and other open technologies all day during my work but too often I get reminded of my time as a flasher- on a much harder way.

Anyway I love these days. Finally flasher and non-flasher are now in a single boat towards the future.
Would you recommend getting sick in the Philippines, or India? I'm sure there's plenty of 50 y.o. Indians with crushing stories about poverty, but nobody blames Ghandi.

The crowd saying "Mao murdered 100 million" are blaming him for everything bad which happened in China, while the "Praise Grandfather Mao" brigade are praising him for everything good which happened in China.

It would be a lot more productive to say: "China started at a low base, and didn't do anything remarkable under Mao or his successors. In terms of health and GDP, it could have been a bit better or a bit worse. He didn't make China poor. He didn't make China rich, either - if he didn't finish off feudalism someone else would have. Chinese guerillas would still have fought the Japanese, and would have won. The only thing (good or bad) that Mao really had any control over was slapping up posters of himself, purging accused rightists, and coloring everything blue and grey."
If you can find a case in which the validator fails, it's wrong. Otherwise, if it's looks like a JSON parser and works like a JSON parser, i.e. is indistinguishable from a "proper" parser, it makes no sense but satisfying OCD to rework it.

Note that the code is now only a work-around for older browsers. Every modern browser supports native JSON parsing anyway.
Plus, who said that (a) I know what I want, (b) what I want is good for me (c) what I want is good for society in general, anyway?

Then who is making those decisions for you?
So big news, binary encoded data is more compact than human-readable strings. I'm sure this new format is useful but bringing in the JSON comparison is completely irrelevant (and probably done only to get some page-hits). AMF is also a binary format, has been around for years, and is probably more compact than JSON too.

I think binary formats are great for online games where performance is critical, however for most applications human-readable strings are a lot easier to manage. In any case, both formats have different use cases.
Was expecting a dubstep remix of a sampling of sounds from a trading floor - but this is even cooler.
That feeling when you discover you're older than the COBOL tag.
Questions Remain Over Hewlett’s Big Charge on Autonomy Acquisition
another non-story
Stalin and Mao are another kind of thing. Their rule led to millions of deaths, but it's not like they enjoyed killing people (as is probably the understanding of naive people calling them 'evil'). Part of the massacres were result of the inevitable power plays in huge countries with hundreds of millions population under a revolution (or regime change) -- the same way that 50.000 people were executed in the French Revolution.

It's sickening watch leftists like you defend Mao and Stalin...and yes, you are.
It's actually worse, because in Canada, a government with a majority gets to pass all of their legislation, no matter how bad it is. In theory, this should not happen as Members of Parliament (a geographically representative body) "cross the aisle" (to borrow the US phrase) to vote against legislation that is bad for their constituents. This never happens though, because any majority member who votes against the party is immediately kicked out.
What would be the advantage of exposing it instead of compressing the data transparently in the background. (Like it is done already.)
"Consider your average web app where the database is manipulated by a public-facing app, an API and a background worker, possibly written in different languages by different companies."

I don't remember being in a situation where that would be the case. Sure, it exists, but it would not be the ideal case.

Usually I'd say you could have several different apps talking to your API (not directly to the DB)

"An empty value is a lot healthier in any code than an undefined variable/key to reference, isn't it?"

data.get('optional_field') in python, for example? Sure, there is some validation enforced by the DB in the relational case, but it is often not enough.

Of course, in most SQL usages you are expected to shift most of the validation to the DB, in NOSQL this is much more restricted, but it's not better or worse, but different.

Unless you are a bank or something like that, then for all means have all aspects in your Oracle DB
FreeBSD Foundation 2012 End-of-Year Newsletter
Generally moving from monarchies to democracies could be considered a "golden" age of human history. Or maybe the rise of rationality and decline of religion.

I don't see any recent big social change that big that happened recently, except the social impact of the web. But i'm not sure i'd considered it as a big positive social change.

What would you say are the big societal changes that happened in the last decade or two ?
Another sick leftist defending another leftist that mass-murdered tens of millions of people.
Facebook paid 0.3% Taxes on $1.34 Billion profits
lef...tist? Are you just trying to make things worse now
That was the issue with Katrina. Building like that where such storms have traditionally been a century occurrence rather than a yearly occurrence is a far lesser error.
> No, it's not. It's mostly about making money. No business cares about "improving the quality of human life and alleviating suffering" (they might pay lip service to that on their brochures though). Shareholders don't care about "alleviating suffering", only about return of investment.

Umm, not all businesses are in the business of providing happiness to people. Some are in fact in the business of providing misery to people. Anyways, businesses are not the ones deciding what services to provide to the people, customers are. So if you want to blame anybody, blame customers (or as Tool put it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoWMmZEoT84).

> And yet, _billions_ of people continue to do that, and _billions_ of people die from deceases that technology has eradicated for us half a century or more ago, and development goes on to other stuff, like --to name but a few-- faster smartphones, game consoles, pet food and bling jewellery.

While I can easily sympathize with your position, rich western corporations don't owe jack shit to third world people. I agree that it would be nice of us to help them out. However if we are not interested in helping them out for whatever reason, they still have the option of helping themselves out - the way we helped out ourselves. I sincerely believe that we are not doing it because we want them bad, but we are too preoccupied with solving our own problems to help those guys out. Yes looking at the difference between them and us, does show our preoccupation with self interest. But the reason we solved so many of our issues in precisely our preoccupation with self interest.

> (I don't mean "development" as in the "scientific development" either. I mean it as business development, the idea that production, sales, whatever must continuously expand. I'd be OK with scientific development put directly in the help of humanity, like, say, AIDS drugs sold at cost in Africa instead of pricing them for profit).

I believe that you and other people with the same attitude as you should put your money where your mouth is and lead the way for the rest of us.
All your wildest dreams will come true.
Open source/Free software should be used by governments not because it's gratis, but rather because it can be audited and modified by public servants.

Implementing a free solution costs money in training, deployment, etc. But I'd rather pay that price than having a company lock my government data.
Founders: Stop Pitching, Start Engaging
We'd decide the schema, and once the schema was known, the CRUD application was fairly obvious and straightforward.

"Show me your flowcharts [code], and conceal your tables [schema], and I shall continue to be mystified; show me your tables [schema] and I won't usually need your flowcharts [code]: they'll be obvious." ~ Fred Brooks
>It's sickening watch leftists like you defend Mao and Stalin...and yes, you are.

Emm, who told you I'm a leftist in the first place?

The fact that I "defended" Hitler against the same accusation of ebing "Evil", shouldn't have rang a few alarm bells that I'm actually NOT a leftist?

Or is it because I wrote that Mao and Stalin wasn't "evil"?

That just makes me a realist -- or if you want it somebody that refuses to use religious terminology for historical affairs.

My guess is, your understanding of Mao and Stalin (or Hitler, for that matter and non-US history in general) cames from pulp books, popular documentaries, some internet articles and a couple of movies. Maybe the high school history class. Am I close?

Please, share your sources with us, because you'll find that you can substantiate what I wrote by reading almost all scholarly sources and definitive academic biographies of said historical figures.
Ask HN: What are some best web security books?
Hi, I'm looking for recommendation of web security books. I need the books to be highly technical and demonstrate by examples.

Meaning - if it talks about csrf attacks it needs to demonstrate how to make this kind of attack by myself as well as how to defend against it.

Any recommendations?
Add wheat to that list, perhaps even gluten too. The body just runs better without gluten.
The cascade is very useful. In real-world situations, where I usually don't have the luxury of building a new website from scratch, the cascade has allowed me to implement changes and improvements the original creators never imagined. Maybe I have been in a hole and missed it, but this is the first complaint I have seen about the cascade.
This PDF looks really great, thank you for mentioning it!
> The Europe that Americans refer to does mostly use the Euro, have better-distributed wealth, plenty of consumers, and ambivalent feelings toward entrepreneurs in most of its parts.

None of the Scandinavian countries have Euroes.
Writing Testable JavaScript Code
It's more than a bit paranoid. Harry's lack of social skills give him Chronic Slytherin Syndrome: assuming that everything going on must be a plot because more mundane explanations or motivations completely elude him. Many of the characters, in fact, completely fail to apply Occam's Razor.
The only thing I hate about pages like this is that they hijack the browser with their fake history. When I press the back button from this page I want to go back to your homepage, or back to HN. I don't want to have to click it 20 times to get back to where I was. Playing the presentation in reverse doesn't even make sense so it's not a use case you should design for.
I think the author's intention was that nested LESS rules aren't considered "bare", so this is OK:

.my-widget {
a {
text-decoration: underline;
}
}
It's not a new format, I have no idea why it's popular news today. Having worked extensively with both msgpack and JSON in a javascript environment, I can tell you, its the closest to JSON of all the binary formats. The difference with JSON is msgpack's strings are binary safe (you can have a png as your value) and the format is a bit more compact, especially around integers.

JSON has: numbers, strings, booleans, null, arrays, objects.
Msgpack has: numbers, raws, booleans, nil, arrays, maps.

So I guess msgpack is a superset of JSON. The raws can contain utf8 encoded strings like JSON mandates, or they can contain other things. There is no technical reason that the keys of the maps have to be strings. You could take a lua table that has another table as key and encode that in msgpack just fine.

In practice, I wanted more out of msgpack, so I extended the format using some of the reserved byte ranges to add in an "undefined" type and a distinction between utf8 encoded string and raw binary buffer.

For me this new format has been extremely useful as a general data serialization between processes (node to node, server to browser, etc..) I usually use it over binary websockets or raw tcp sockets.
Why is Google+ Google's Biggest Strategy Blunder?
In 2013, Social Networks will shift from bragging about your immediate pas to organizing your future activities.

Google is the best positioned to drive that transition, but not with Google+.

The "Social Utility" model will fade because it is no longer a game of scale and commoditization.

Mobility is totally and forever changing the game: mobility moves the value consumers seek towards the integration with the tasks they want or need to accomplish (in a perfect Innovator's Solution case).
This got some downotes. If you're skeptical, have you bet TRIED to quit wheat?

It's incredibly hard. I stopped, but it took months of cravings. Very easy to stop eating almost anything else, usually.
The top 10 most influential Internet rights activists in 2012
Apple withdraws patent claim against Samsung's Galaxy S III mini
I have yet to find such a person that trains to use Excel or Windows.
I posted this. Good news on the patent front, but a shame the S III mini will not be available in the USA. My wife and I both have S IIIs and love them. I just spent 3 weeks in the Amazon Basin and the S III was perfect for travelling. With the 1280x720 screen, it was great for reading eBooks, taking video and pictures, and for communication.

I have usually liked Apple as a company but their patent trolling is pissing me off.
Boost has a decent implementation of just a property tree which given a little magic can pretty much serialize into any key-value format. I used it pretty successfully for commandline and INI values for a simple game engine.
Anecdotally that appears to be correct. My company tried to sponsor a graphic designer to come up from the States. We were denied because the gov't said there were more than enough skilled graphic designers available.
We will end forbidding everything. Besides, taking sugar is a personal option wich doesn't kill anyone around you. Tobacco while you smoke you make smoke everyone the room, even on the street. We just need education to measure the excesses.
How many millions will the world lose because schools have been using windows xp/7 and now the world is going to migrate to tiled windows 8?

The correct answer is: Nobody cares. You are bullshitting us.
I mean, maybe it will matter. Maybe it won't. Maybe everyone will migrate to tablets.

You don't have to teach narrow and expiring skills in school. Like "Windows XP" or "Microsoft Office". The half-life of such skills is smaller than the length of the full school course.

And of course you should not rely on the teaching of narrow and expiring skills and lie to us about how someone is going to lose billions over narrow and expiring skills being teached in a different way.
There are plenty of laws. The problem here is that "law" doesn't mean anything if there's no one to enforce it.

Will wiretapping laws be enforced against you? Yes. If you wiretap the government they're going to do a Bradley Manning on you - solitary naked confinement.

Will wiretapping laws be enforced against the President, the NSA, the FBI, the CIA, Verizon executives, Level3 executives, and so on? No.

There's consensus among the Congress and Judiciary and President on those two things.

And that's the problem. The words of the law are meaningless if enforcement depends on who the violator is.
Uhm, no. In MongoDB, you can decide for each query/operation how much consistency you need. You can fire and forget, you can wait for it to be journaled, wait for it to be flushed to disk, wait for it to be replicated to N number of slaves.
Each list includes only the users who have social networking links in their profile

Well, that's going to skew the results beyond usefulness.
especially after he proposed in the journal Nature that sugar should be regulated like alcohol and that people who buy soda should be carded.

Another sick leftist that wants to regulate every human activity.
1) So what? They're going to be blown away by Google Docs. Or tablets. Or wikis. Or whatever. But it's going to happen. It does not matter.

2) Why is that bad in the context of school?
That's the "sufficiently smart compiler" argument ("If only the world was perfect, then the world would be perfect, and although there is no evidence the world can in fact be perfect, and there is mounting evidence that it isn't, I will assume it can and will be made perfect soon enough").

Except for the boot signature, all of these could have been successfully implemented in the past and prevented everything you reference -- how on earth would an internet virus update the kernel or boot unless the kernel let it? but that wasn't the case.

There is no reason that secure boot would help in this respect.
Review of in-app purchases in the 30 top grossing apps
"You want to get As and As? Eat breakfast."

"I don’t have time to eat breakfast," the [13 year old] girl said.

"She'd rather put on makeup than eat breakfast," the girl's mother interrupted.

I'm a Lustig fan, but the people who deserve an overwhelming about of the blame here are the parents.
Sugar is bad. I'm trying hard to quit using it, but it's EVERYWHERE!
I bought some smoked salmon the other day and the damn thing had sugar put in it! Why?!
The same goes for a lot of supermarket sold crap. Sugar, sugar, sugar.
Creating Custom File Input With PHP, CSS3 and jQuery Made Easier
Those are money packed in a box and send to USA.

Open source would have caused Greece to spend a part of that money inside the country, employing local specialists.