skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What to with 2 weeks off?
I have 2 weeks of annual leave to take by the end of March. I would like to use this time to do something that makes me more employable.

I'm a mediocre front end web developer. I know HTML, CSS and JS. I have worked with Angular a little. I have dabbled with Node.

What's the best way to spend 2 weeks, if my goal is improving my chances of getting hired as a front end developer? Learn a hot new framework? Try to build a side project? Do programming exercises (e.g. Project Euler) to work on the fundamentals? Something else altogether?
Article totally misses the point of react...
> Let’s not build that feature.
> Is there existing software that could be used instead?

Where is the fun of being a software engineer, then?
(not eric, but had the same thought)

Everything just feels way oversized, in a Fisher-Price kind of way. The font, the colors and "chunky"-ness of the UI.

The full-width content-area doesn't help either. The whole page gets right up in your face and shouts the content at you.

Concrete suggestions:

- dial down the font size

- put some blank space in the left-right marigns of the page (responsive if possible).

- maybe choose a more passive shade of blue for the background.

EDIT: here's an example comparing your page with wikipedia http://recordit.co/Za7NuT8Hy7
> This might as well be Java.

Chromium specific certainly isn't as good as open standards, but it isn't as bad as Java. Once chromium is ported to something it doesn't face legal uncertainty.
Those are perfect, thanks! After I'm doing fiddling with things later, do you mind if I solicit your feedback?
How to setup the headless three: PHPUnit, Selenium 2, and ChromeDriver
Uo Waterloo Faculty Against Severing Ties with Israeli Academic Institutions
Brave Browser for Desktop and Laptop Computers Running Windows, OS X, and Linux
Don' exaggerate. His point is that you shouldn't allow sponsors that could lead to conflicts of interest, not all sponsors that do "bad".

In your example you can go to a symposium on quantum chemistry sponsored by the gov despite the gov eavesdropping. You shouldn't go to a converence on cancer research standards sponsored by the homeopathy league of gentlemen.
Are you suggesting that they are just detecting the un-incorporated foreign DNA after CRISPR? I think the fact it has been shown that the knocked-in DNA is inherited to the progeny is strong enough evidence that the DNA was actually inserted.

Unless you want to argue that the un-incorporated DNA was also transmitted to the next generation, which honestly, is extremely unlikely.
Public repository: https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop
Graphene dental fillings make it more strength and can stay forever
But when you invite them to sponsor the event, that’s a whole different ball game. They’re no longer just at the table, they’ve paid for the table.

Or in other words: He who pays the piper calls the tune.

He makes a very valid point in my book.
I know. I visited the Basildon NYSE facility. That said, it's half empty (I mean, the colocation halls are half empty).
I do not think a product with zero lines of code is always better than a product with 10,000. So there is obviously some metric that goes up with lines of code but goes down with bugs and technical debt.

Sometimes the downswing from a single line is so dramatic, that such maxims are expressed... but don't take them too literally. Let's be real here.
Honestly I don't understand the craze of wanting to put EVERYTHING in a browser. I'm sure in many cases (for game development at least) it's easier to do it native, not to mention a tonne faster and less resource-intensive.

Heck, I'd even go so far as to venture that Java webapps run better than WebGL+JS. Perhaps I'm just biased/bitter because the open source radeon driver does nothing good by way of 3D acceleration.
HN is also "fairly outdated" in that regard.

But you asked about public discussions, which is a rather different topic.
the 10x engineer gets paid around 2 mil right
absolutely, but we don't talk about unskilled workforce, this guy is an engineer. And even if work is hard to find and you have to take it, you probably will be actively looking for a better job very quickly. So ultimately company that is enforcing such strict and hostile rules is going to loose all the best people very quickly (because they will be first to get a better job)... and that's bad for business and at the same time I doubt that it improves performance significantly, so it's pretty stupid strategy IMHO...
The value of Y Combinator IMO is entirely in social signaling, not the meager $$$ they give you.
Europe’s weather authorities are extremely stingy with their nearest equivalent data – their attitude is that the observations are for science or for money, not for silly websites.

Feel free to provide an email address for us to complain.
I love the mental gymnastics people like this perform to convince themselves of their own rhetoric.

It reminds me of the guy from the MPAA who not long ago said that BitTorrent (the protocol, and the company) and The Pirate Bay were 'an assault on on our human rights and civil liberties'.

Right. I wonder how many people he convinced by that utter manure.
I wrote a script that downloads the live (well, every 10 minutes, with 30 minutes delay) tiles from the himawari-8 website and update my background with it. Gnome is nice enough that it refreshes the background when the configured image changes.

I'm waiting for the solar eclipse in March, it should be (indirectly) visible. http://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/solar/2016-march-9
Personality vs. Skills for freelance translators
How to Self-Publish a Bestseller: Over 400 Books Sold in 10 Days
Scrolling Text on LED Matrix 8x8
> source installation is too complex

Which is why a lot of smart people have invented these things called package managers. If your app needs a redis instance and a postgres instance, define dependencies on those two things in the package metadata.

> Why do you think the Omnibus packages are a nightmare?

Because they force the use of bundled software in a virtual black-box. You are then dependent on the maintainer of the application to also keep up to date with security patches for every piece of software they bundle.

It also ties you to their setup process - a package that simply declares its requirements/recommendations means that I can integrate it with my existing systems e.g. I can use a Debian config package to configure and install a redis instance how i want, and their software doesn't need to worry about it.

I am amazed that people can say "our product is a rails application, but we also bundle a postgres server and a redis server and nginx and ruby" with a straight face. If you want to target potential users who find it too hard to use a package manager (which again, should be automatic or very close to it), provide pre-installed images for the major virtualisation/containerisation platforms.
What's an actual use case for this? It sounds pretty obscure, so it's not surprising you haven't seen any examples of it.
Introducing Eclipse Che Beta – The Open Source Alternative to IntelliJ
And you forgot to read the "about" page. :) It's not a rendering, it's pictures of the planet.
Creating isochrones and isodistances using Googles direction search api
The brain communicates on several channels
Even if they only move at the speed of light, they can travel in a straight line directly through the earth instead of along the curved surface, saving time. The problem is that if neutrinos can pass through the entire earth unimpeded, most of them will pass through your detector on the other side too.
I get how it would be extremely difficult for the US to have the true pricing on items, with sales tax being different even within the same state!!!

In countries, where sales tax is federal and it's a flat 10% everywhere, I'm eternally grateful that I don't have to do mental gymnastics to figure how how much something will actually cost.
Use MaxTraffic to Improve Magento Results
Market makers are highly unlikely to "ruin or starve millions". Consider some graphs of the biggest HFT screwups ever:

https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/flash_crash_flash_in...

I have no idea why you think an HFT system is somehow more polluting than an ordinary server displaying cat pictures. Could you explain?

Insofar as the stock market doesn't reflect "real world" performance that's primarily due to tax induced distortions. That situation is only getting worse as businesses go global, and the crazy US system of taxing foreign income turns double taxation into triple taxation.
SoftBank Plans to Open Store Staffed Almost Entirely by Its Humanoid Robot
> England has been a land apart for nearly a thousand years - ruled by the same monarchy, no part of it successfully invaded by violence

I'm no scholar of English history but the Glorious Revolution was at least as big a breach in political continuity as the American Revolution and resulted in a foreigner (Dutch) on the English throne. And the Hannoverians are another separate royal line that had continental European holdings.
Uber boss suggests drivers use ’90s kids game to distract drunk passengers
Whatsapp, the “middle class” and the underground world of content (translated)
The facts are easily verifiable read about Yuri Totrov. It is well documented by both sides.
Night Shift: Meet the couple Apple “ripped off” with new sleep-better screens
If you become reasonably good at finding existing solutions to the problem at hand, and you save 90% of yours and company's time, then it frees you (and the business, and consequently society at large) to pursue any other new problems that haven't yet been solved. Software is a means, not an end in itself.

To me, solving known problems and doing the same thing over and over, just changing the tools, is akin to digging holes and covering them again. And what is the fun in that?
Isn't it a bit hypocrite that mr. Balkan's Hearbeat project is specifically designed for Apple IOS, which is a major corporation? see: https://forum.ind.ie/t/we-re-building-for-os-x-and-ios-not-l...
Thank you! I'm going to work through those suggestions later. Do you mind if I ask for your feedback afterwards?
GitMask – contribute to GitHub OSS projects anonymously
In 2016 art is a series of selfies
But a 3D lattice is actually quite bad in the sense of having a very high graph diameter for the same degree (6) as the number of nodes goes to infinity, compared to other designs, though probably not so bad for low n. Still far better than a square lattice, of course. Wiring of processors in clusters and supercomputers is one of the main uses of graphs with low degree and high diameter (see [1]). I also know that twisted hypercubes were used for connection graph of nodes in supercomputers, because they have a number of nodes which is a power of 2, fairly simple and uniform routing rules (in general other graphs don't), large bisection bandwidth, low diameter, high (maximal?) fault tolerance, and more.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_the_largest_known_gra...
Looks like this jsfiddle just doesn't do per-pixel z-sorting (which I wouldn't have expected from browser 3D effects) but in my brain that shouldn't be an issue with cubes (no polygons overlapping).
Sure, go for it :)
There's certainly some truth in that--although I'm not sure how unique to business relationships it is. The more one has invested in a relationship generally, the more they'll generally put into smoothing over a rough patch or making changes that allow the relationship to continue. Conversely, the more transactional the arrangement is, the more likely you are to terminate it if the immediate benefits aren't worth it. This applies whether employees, suppliers, plumbers, or whatever.
Millions of trades a day each contain teensy, tiny little updates about the state of the economy. Think of them like tweets, not like State of the Union addresses. This married couple wants to send their daughter to college more than they want Google. That hedge fund likes Coke more than Apple. This pension fund doing it's weekly buy of an index to prepare for 2075.

The market is these little packets bouncing off each other and summarized. High numbers of them are not unhealthy. On the contrary, it means more information is moving with less overhead loss to middlemen. (By analogy: What's more expensive, 100k tweets, 10 phone calls, or a FedEx envelope? If you say "clearly it's the tweets because there are so darn many" that would be a weird answer for an engineer to believe.)

If you believe the world economy is going to heck in a hand basket, there exist ways for you to be richly compensated for that expert opinion by sending your tweets into the machine. (Well, if you're proven right.) HFTs will happily minimize the transactional costs you incur while making that statement, as compared to the sweaty, yelling colluding-against-you jocks they have replaced.
What inverts in the dependency inversion principle?
Success considered harmful
Look on Craigslist for a short-term employment opportunity. The job might not be listed as part-time or short-term, but the cool thing about Craigslist jobs is they are put up by smaller businesses that'll be willing to work around your schedule. Don't ask for too much pay, and just be honest about what you're trying to accomplish.
$200 is still pretty expensive, if you just need phone call and maybe text messaging.

I wouldn't expect a huge number of people to go back to "dumb phones" though. Even if their carrier won't subsidise it or provide a payment plan, people will buy new smart phones, because they're use to having the features. Upgrades will just be less frequent.
I just hang out in one channel, of an old Half-Life 2 mod where those still left have been there for 15 years. Been cool to still keep in contact and see where people progress in their life throughout those years.
5 TED Talks that you need to watch in 2016
I made a script that sets the latest image from Himawari-8 as your desktop background - new picture of Earth every 10 mins!

https://gist.github.com/jarmitage/5042bfe20aa54b3d8dc8
First of all, thank you, accessing ESXi servers via vSphere has been a god send over the years (FWIW, still running relatively recent version of vSphere on an ancient 2003 Server VM ;-)).

Workstation was my go to as well for desktop development needs for many years, but switched to VirtualBox after Workstation 10. Kernel updates on Linux often broke Workstation. You needed to wait for VMware to release an update, upgrade to the next version (that would also soon lag behind latest kernels), or search for a patch over on Arch[0].

VirtualBox does the trick but Workstation's a better product.

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/vmware-patch
I also get a loading 0%. OSX Chrome.

From the page src:

// [Not like piano music.](http://achewood.com/index.php?date=11082002)

I'm intrigued but don't understand the comic.
Information looks good.
Design looks a bit old doesnt affect anyway but I would recommend updating it.
SEO of the site is worse.

What is the plan for revenue? contextual advertisement? Donation? Or something else?

I would love to collaborate and help in UI/UX and SEO. Ping me if you wish to connect: vivek@eyuva.com

Recent work: oizom.com, metavideos.com
Only time I ever attempted something remotely similar was during a PoC using a specialized client device (think RF handheld) that needed to render content quickly in a custom browser. Loading tons of dependencies was my concern. So writing custom components with pure JS was the approach BUT those components were not for rendering views and instead for initializing behavior with regard to keypress behavior per view. Attempting to render content was still done with a server side templating framework (Thymeleaf). This was eventually abandoned because development and testing cross browser (on a PC) was buggy.

As many have already stated, a tutorial like this is interesting for hobby projects, but I would not adopt this approach in production. Libraries and frameworks have a lot of energy invested in them and should be considered early.
400 sales constitute a "bestseller"?

Damn, the book industry must be really dead.
Click-bait title, maybe a better title is 'how to be more effective'?

All of the tasks mentioned are valuable assets to the business. Operational support, developing new features, understanding dependencies, building tools, communication - they're all part of the job man.

53 upvotes and these goober comments reminds me that HN is mostly <21 years old; time to move on.
Will Someone Please Make a Good Bookmarklet Repository
The ability to show something more than aggregates is, sure, a UI/front-end issue. (And an issue with intermediate storage, obviously).

But it's misleading to say that tracing-vs-sampling isn't a factor, unless you believe that the most-performant sampling and the most-performant tracing are roughly comparable. TFA claims otherwise; the claim is that the maximum resolution of tracing is much better than the maximum resolution of sampling.
Not particularly. His point isn't that you shouldn't do anything sponsored by a major corporation. It's that this is a privacy conference, and these specific major corporations make their money off of destroying privacy. That's a conflict of interest.

Anyway, lately Apple is the big institutional champion for end-to-end encryption, so they might be on the "allowable sponsors" list for a privacy conference.
There's many differences to consider before calling it 'waste', however that's capital expenditure and not operational which is completely different.
Or, just make better drivers for linux....
By "host," I meant FQDN. I think my examples made it clear that I didn't mean per ip or machine.
Qira: a timeless debugger
> Apple is a major corporation

Aral isn't against making money - I'm not sure why anyone would think he was - he's in favour of privacy.

Apple have actually done a pretty good job in stopping governments who want to forbid privacy.
Have been on board with this idea for some time, but, that said, here's some criticism of the specifics:

> Is there existing software that could be used instead?

Agree, up to a point. Very few OTS/SAAS solutions are practical financially and customized, and if they are (as in a company that adds those crazy features you want to their SAAS app)- watch out! Those companies products will end up hitting a wall eventually because they will have coded themselves into a corner. Note: this actually because the company you are using didn't use the 0.1x engineer philosophy.

> Let’s not build/deploy that development tool.

Maybe. But it depends. How often is human error affecting your process in a very time-consuming way? You wouldn't say CI is a bad thing would you? What about using an IDE when you've got developers or a development language that best lends itself to an IDE? You would buy that IDE right (unless you're really, really cash-strapped- compare it to the cost of a few days of your developer's time)?

> Let’s not adopt this new technology.

Maybe. How about instead- let's adopt what are solid winners technology-wise that will help us attract new talent and develop features more quickly. And when we do that, we first do in small pieces that are independent to prove it out, then eventually we commit to using it as much as it makes sense so that we don't end up with 3 tech stacks to maintain in ten years.

> Can we achieve the same thing with a technology that the team is already using and familiar with? “The best tool for the job” is a very dangerous phrase.

Sure, mostly. But don't get a shitty open-source IDE instead of paying $600 for a good one, or force developers that use UI tools to use vim because you're too darn cheap either, even if it would do the job. On the other hand, I agree- don't just buy things. Really let your dev teams hash it out and choose appropriate tools- don't dictate anything without getting feedback and adequate buy-in when it comes to tools.

> Let’s not automate this.

Again- what about CI and scripts that can help make developers work consistently, more productively, more efficiently overall, and with fewer errors?

Sure- if you are a one-man team, you might not need continuous deployment yet, but please don't sit there and have devs pulling oars in your wooden sea vessel as the hovercrafts speed past you in the race.
It happens often enough, that I sometimes stop banging my head on a problem and wait until the next day in case my brain figures it out while I'm sleeping. When it works, I wake up with the solution
The author wasn't arguing against the very existance of corporations. The article is about the conflict of interests in a particular situation.
What percentage of users have opted to stick with smaller iPhones?
This is profoundly false and I would have hoped you'd know better than to make an argument like this. There's an enormous gap between the CLR and (even bleeding-edge) asm.js, not only in standard library feature set but in language feature set. MSIL is dramatically more expressive and the runtime offers a bunch of capabilities that still aren't available in the browser.

At present if you want to actually run a typical .NET application in the browser, you will have to boot and run an entire CLR implementation in asm.js, specifically because asm.js is not expressive enough to map typical CLR code to it. This includes things like reimplementing garbage collection because the browser still doesn't offer basic primitives like weak references. Even once you do that, there are specific things you won't be able to do - for example, weakly hold references to the DOM, or handle cross-language reference cycles.

For the record: I am the author of a .NET -> JS translator with near-complete CLR feature support, including unsafe code (pointers) and p/invoke. This stuff is not trivial, and much of the difficulty is a direct result of how anemic asm.js is as a compilation target, not to mention how pathetic the ES5 stdlib is. I'm also a participant in the WebAssembly spec process and I think you've misrepresented what it currently offers.

The web has a bright future but pretending it doesn't have problems does no good. It's honestly quite insulting for someone to claim that everything is OK here when I've been fighting hard for years to get the ecmascript and HTML5 feature sets moved forward so that the web can actually compete with .NET.
> Not sure what "underfunded" means here. Thunderbird works. Email isn't evolving like the web is, so what point is
there for Mozilla to throw resources at it?

If you look at the arguments people can give against a switch Thunderbird, they make valid points on some lacking features, that terrible solutions like Outlook do have. This is a problem since in some places they force people to use proprietary solutions for email based on these arguments.

>Typical attitude in open source software: the more free something is, the more entitled people feel about it.

Can you really make that judgment?
Many people have felt the same way about Mozilla's actions for a while.
People who donate and contribute to free software.
People who may have found inexcusable the lies about the money agreement on Pocket, among many other things.
If you think these people are all spoiled brats, then good for you.

>What this has to do with Push Notifications is anybodies guess.

The initial comment was using this to justify that "Mozilla does remember their values".
This is part of browsers improvements to stay competitive, not so much about value.
The sad truth is the larger the organization the more removed and individual engineer is from defining the work and prioritizing its business value.