skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I use a Firefox extension called "NoSquint" on my Retina MacBook Pro and set the default page size to 140%, saving me the trouble of hitting cmd-+ a couple of times each time I go to a new website. That seems to result in a roughly balanced number of pages that are too small and pages that are too large.

If I always wore my reading glasses, which I usually don't, I would probably set this to 120%. With reading glasses, my vision on this retina display is razor sharp, and I still think the text on most web pages is too small for maximum comfort.
Will There be a Wave of “Maker-centric” Companies?
Image processing libraries for JavaScript
Children who steal
Opalrb has been on the HN frontpage. Why is there always someone whining about their perception of HN user sentiments lately? There's even a post whining about the user sentiments in the comments of this post on the frontpage now.
I rather like the Parallax portfolio sites. They simply value emotional design over usability to offer an immersive experience. It's a different approach, and for a portfolio site, I'd argue it's better.
نتايج الامتحانات: ظهرت الان نتيجة ابتدائية الاسكندرية 2013 برقم الجلوس
I'm a full stack developer from Buckinghamshire with 4 years of experience (mainly web dev), currently working with PHP/MySQL/JS/Java developing large scale enterprise software, also learning Scala on a side. I was gonna start looking for a job in central London this year, preferably Java/Scala based, but I always though that I'll be lucky to get £40K. Does this mean I can aim higher?
But we must take account of the numbers. As Orwell might put it, 'some tax, good, more tax - double plus good'. Not exactly true is it? On the whole, (and this is not a zero tax argument) the following from Milton Friedman seems a truism to me.

“When a man spends his own money to buy something for himself, he is very careful about how much he spends and how he spends it.When a man spends his own money to buy something for someone else,he is still very careful about how much he spends, but somewhat less what he spends it on. When a man spends someone else's money to buy something for himself, he is very careful about what he buys, but doesn't care at all how much he spends. And when a man spends someone else's money on someone else, he doesn't care how
much he spends or what he spends it on. And that's government for you.”
I'm impressed by the stuff I see here, all the time. I've only been using HN for a couple of months but I, too, have noticed a decline in the quality of comments. The comments used to be about how amazing the information in the link is, what's so amazing about it, how it can be used, how it can be improved concluded with brownie points for the OP. Now, all I read about is how dumb the post is. Author wrote too much/little and doesn't know what they're talking about. Just look at the comments for the 'Mistakes designers make over and over again' post that's currently on the front page.

Someone should research this. Every-single-time a nice little community starts expanding rapidly all the construction is gone and all we're left with is the destruction. Reddit and HN being the most recent examples I can think of. For a throw back: Anyone remember GameFAQs of 1998? Go check it now.
Nice to see! Some things are working very well:

>> class Fixnum; def even?; self%2==0; end; end;
>> (1..100).to_a.select{|i| i.even? }

But some basic things are broken:

>> n = 5
=> 5
>> n
=> RuntimeError: arena overflow error
How many Javascripers does it take to change a lightbulb?

NaN.
Started off at a consultancy company in central London in 2010 on £30K as a 'grad dev'. I know that a 'Senior Consultant' would be given between £40 and £50K at this company.

Since then I've moved on, and am on £48K.

Full stack developer, using mostly ruby and related tech atm, was .NET based mostly before that, but could have been thrown into a project doing anything.
Tried and false
I always try to make a point of showing appreciation when someone programmed something cool.
Yes, I understand this, although I don't see any difference in number of applicants when I mention the salary and when I don't (I usually don't). I'm not seeing many good people who would be ready to join if I paid them more (it happens occasionally and we usually find a compromise). My recruiters are telling me that increasing the offer wouldn't give me more applicants.

However, if the harsh reality is that I must be paying more to devs, then how come there are so many devs (about 200) in this poll indicating they are getting under 50K? Why these two hundred people don't talk to me and many other companies desperate to hire developers on much better terms?
looking forward to this event.
The latest figures I could find from the OECD on public spending gave (in US$ PPP):

United Kingdom: 2857.3
United States: 3966.7

Where did you get your numbers from? If they're more accurate, I'm happy to go with them.
Ah, yes, the Gervais Principle. More people here should be familiar with that.

Also, why isn't there a startup in SV trying to truly disrupt the housing market there? Can it even be done?
Nifty example, but this is why we have integration test suites.

PyPy, jython, ironpython etc all had/have incompatibilities as the language evolves and as they work out the quirks in their respective runtimes.

This isn't compatible with cpython (afaik, none of the other runtimes have ever been COMPLETELY compatible, but this is much further off), but hell, it's pretty awesome.

As an aside, I'd shoot anyone who did that ^^ without a pretty amazing explaination.
Developers and engineers in general develop an ego with time. They take pride in their work and are very protective of it. They also relish the petty mistakes that others make and scoff at them - 'pfft I could have used X instead of Y to do Z. Who uses Y anymore !?'.

For example, you can find this behavior when someone posts something about problem X and there is a minor grammatical mistake or an opinion that is expressed in the post that is unconventional. The comments section will zero in on that and miss the big picture.
How many ed users does it take to change a light bulb?

?
6. If you can, start getting up at 5:00 in the morning. Get some productive hours banged out before you go to work. If you can't go to bed early, then compensate by taking mid-afternoon naps in a place where your co-workers won't find you (almost no one gets anything done during those hours anyway). Relatedly, it's worth a lot of money to kill your commute. If you can't afford to live near work, then consider a different city.

I like Intermittent Fasting of the Martin Berkhan flavor - you don't eat breakfast or lunch. You free up your lunch hour and you don't get sluggish in the afternoon (AND it's easier to lose weight, of course).
I've been active here for about 2 years now. I don't think there's been the dreadful decline people are talking about; I think it's mostly nostalgia talking. I know intellectually that I basically hated highschool and spent most of it alternatively depressed or bored out of my skull, yet somehow that period of my life has taken on a rosy tint.

Sometimes OPs are wrong or misguided and somebody with more experience or expertise is there to point out why.

That's valuable.

Often you hear from the creators of things. Folk who are at the coalface of some system, company or problem.

That's valuable.

So sometimes it comes with a bit of grunge and grump. I don't really care. The rest is worth it.
OK, it's rude. But Basecamp makes mistake #2 from the article, which is actually a mistake to call it a mistake.

Really? Testimonials? Out of all of the potential and made-up customer feedback, you've hand-selected a few data points to advertise on your homepage. Even if they were randomly selected (obviously not), reducing the data down to mere anecdotes is... stupid. Insanely stupid. I can't even wrap my head around why people would ever base a decision on that.

And so when it presents the thought bubble of the woman thinking about how she uses Basecamp and the fact that, of the extremely unbiased sample of people who use Basecamp (haha), 97% of them recommend Basecamp, I'm just unimpressed.

Here's my number one beef with homepages: I still don't what your product actually specifically does. I don't want generalizations like "manage your projects" and "keep track of every file, discussion, and event" (what the hell is an event?). I want something concrete like "Basecamp lets you write words, puts checkboxes next to them, then moves them around randomly" (I'm not a fan of the product so my summarization may be biased).
Form follows function. Basecamp may not have the prettiest looking homepage, but at least it works. The copy effectively communicates what Basecamp is, and the website is laid out fairly well.

Was there something specific about the page that you had a critique on?
I'm easily impressed by:

- Huge projects which are still understandable within minutes,

- Products which handle special cases, which in turn amaze its users (when the dev has managed to get beyond her own use cases),

- and devs who write more elegant code than me (clever use of patterns, readability, yadayada).

It's easy to sniff at another dev's code, since nobody's perfect, and code is often a compromise of a conflict of various factors (and each conflict can be solved in various ways). But, this loop which has a workaround for a off-by-one error which is caused elsewhere - has likely been written under time pressure, and I might someday make the same mistake. I think it all boils down to dev compassion.
> I'm not clear on which error check you think you might "forget". If you're performing an operation that can fail, wouldn't that be a clue that you need to check for failure?

Sure - and the possibility of exceeding the bounds of an array would be a clue that you need to bounds check, but there's still a hell of a lot of C code out there with array overflow errors. You can argue that people who make these errors are bad programmers, but that's fairly irrelevant - most programmers of any level will end up working with code with errors in it at some point. Exception stack traces are an extremely useful way to find out where something went wrong when someone failed to do some necessary error checking.

I have no experience with Go, so I'm not saying what it does is wrong - I'm just curious. Say a customer experiences a failure with your software caused by some missing/incorrect error handling, what do you do to work out what happened?
I am receiving letters from recruiters every day. Salaries rarely exceed 55-60k. Why should I bother if I am already getting that? And that's a mainstream enterprise skill set. Also your recruiters are likely to filter out people you might like. Did you tell them that github repo trumps a degree?
The approach and the phrasing seems exactly right to me and not at all off-putting.

The goal of Brython is to replace javascript on the web, seems straightforward right? The way they go about it is to implement a compiler in javascript, and use that to bootstrap a python in the browser community. Seems like that is much easier than convincing Chrome/Firefox/IE to include a python compiler in their browser.

How would Brython replace javascript if it were precompiled on the server?
Thanks. The coolest thing I've been wrong about in ages.
In the short run yes, money would be redistributed within the economy towards things poor folk like to buy, causing prices to rise. In the longer term price increases signal profitability and other providers enter the market or existing players compete to drive prices back towards the cost of production.
Why technology must be the solution to child abuse material online
In all my Python years, I have never needed to write a long anonymous function. I consider it a bit of a code smell.

This isn't to say it's wrong to do in JS, just that the patterns in Python are different so you don't use this in practice.
I've noticed this as well and I've always felt it had to do with the fact that you cannot downvote comments. Comments systems that allow for only upvoting seem to skew towards surfacing loud comments versus reasonable comments.

The silent reasonable majority (that is less inclined to comment or even vote) needs a way to help curate when things get unbalanced. Think about how you might not end up actually clicking upvote on a comment that is reasonable and that you agree with but how you most definitely would downvote the snide negative comments that top HN comments sections all too frequently.
Big Data will transform healthcare – Infographic
I think the quality of the comments reflects the average quality of the posts. We can't talk about how amazing the information is if the submitted link is a 3 paragraph blog post. So unfortunately the average commenter becomes the type of person who comments on 3 paragraph blog posts.

Now here's a cool startup idea. A ranking system that takes into account not only community upvotes, but an automated NLP assessment of the quality of writing. Useful for both the submitted posts/articles and for the comments.
Unfortunately, unless you have a very deep understandning of your operating system AND you're logging audit to a REMOTE system, you should assume the worst and reinstall all reachable systems from scratch. Invalidate all ssh keys. Then check your databases for suspicious admin accounts before going live.

If not, how do you know if backdoors were installed, if the databases were modified, if local (known or unknown) exploits were used to gain root or if private ssh keys were stolen or used to gain access to other servers?
I really do hope this (or something like it) takes off. More choice in languages is better, and JS has been the only option for too long.

It would be amazing if browsers added interpreters natively, then we could check for a native interpreter and fall back to loading a JS one like brython.
You can downvote comments once you reach a certain karma. 500, I think.
According to various world rankings, it's top 20-40 and 5th or 6th in Britain and Europe.

But it's quite strong for CS/AI, as they have the largest CS department in Europe, producing the largest amount of world-leading research (according to the latest government-organised Research Assessment Exercise).

For undergrads that means there is an unparalleled variety of courses you can take, both in depth and breadth. I remember I had a choice of about 25 courses in my 3rd year and over 50 in my final year. For most British universities, your choice is rather limited - usually between 8-12 courses each year. Another bonus is that you get to work with leading researchers on your final year project. E.g. some of my friends were supervised by Phil Wadler - the guy was one of the principal inventors of Haskell and, with Gilad Bracha and Martin Odersky, designed Java generics and the extensions of the Collections framework.

So, Edinburgh is quite special and CS/AI is a particular focus at the University, so it's a shame not enough people know it.
> HN is definitely the latter since comments in this community are largely reserved for criticism while the appreciation is (usually) limited to upvotes.

I think this reasoning is fairly sound and possibly hints that HN may be less unfriendly than the comments alone make out.

Anonymity tends to make criticism easier to lob around. I'm in academia and even super-critical reviews tend to be prefaced by apologetic "good points" before the submission gets eviscerated; even then a good reviewer will give constructive feedback. I wonder if we could borrow this approach to commenting to improve the atmosphere?
Which was exactly what happened in the comments. I haven't read one impolite response.
I could have made this joke much more succinctly in another language.
My parser makes a stack machine intermediate code that gets converted to 64-bit machine code.

I wrote a fucken 64-bit compiler and kernel from scratch.
But you can downvote comments, if you have sufficient karma.

So is the problem that the people with the power don't exercise it, or that people don't upvote the reasonable comments in a sufficient ratio to push the bad comments down?

Meta-HN is not my favourite topic but perhaps it's time we had a review to account for how the community has changed since the last one.
This guy should be disbarred, he and his wife should end up paying Apple damages to cover all the costs in all lawsuits that this company was involved in. Good luck getting any of that to happen.

As for the schadenfreude in this thread: I don't like Apple much, they've done a lot of bad things in the last couple of years but I see absolutely no reason to wish any of this on them.
Revisiting my jQuery gallery - without jQuery
I agree with you re:health care and our inept congress. In terms of entrepreneurship not being right for everyone, I agree. However, the thought experiment was oversimplified a bit.

There are human-required jobs that won't be infinitely scalable. Artist, masseuse, daycare provider, teacher, author, sales, marketer, circus performer, mover, software engineer, owner, landlord, nurse, doctor. The dystopian argument is usually that technology will require less of these jobs. It usually doesn't go as far as saying "none" and that is where the people who aren't cut out for entrepreneurship will land.
never send anything in email that you wouldn't be comfortable seeing on the front page of the New York Times

This was the standard advice -- in exactly those words -- given to students receiving computing accounts at my university at least 20 years ago. I always wondered where it came from; did someone a few decades ago send an email which ended up on the front page of the New York Times?
Startups tend to ignore children privacy law
Well since you can have hardware emulator in javascript, we surely became less impressed in what you can run in the browser.
example that come in mind
http://bellard.org/jslinux/index.html
If all the obnoxious posts were like that we wouldn't have a problem. The problem is with bad comments that are not sufficiently incendiary for people who agree with their thesis to want to downvote them.
I got to my compensation level (L64) as an individual contributor.

I switched to be a first-level manager for a couple of years, but there was no bump in level since it was the same effective scope (12 directs).
I was quietly thinking out loud. So yes, I was perfectly serious.

If some method of taxation was narrowly burdensome, I probably wouldn't think it was sensible.

But, for instance, maybe there is a way to (relatively objectively) identify businesses that employ lots of people but are less location sensitive. Some mild tax on such a business should not have an enormous impact on the employees (I immediately see an objection to this idea, the cost of maintaining a location already provides similar pressure).
Not all jobs require producing a solution in a short time to a trivial problem, some jobs involve a lot of abstract thought (academia, some software companies) which the OP seems to enjoy, though very few combine high salary, thinking freely on topics which interest you, no workplace politics, and convenient location, however if you are not in a job and environment which satisfies you, you clearly have the abilities and resources to change that situation.

To the OP I'd say:

Ditch the commute - either move closer to work or find other work - I don't know how you can stand a 4 hour commute, that alone would knock me out.
Long term, ditch the job - it's clearly not a good fit for you, there are plenty of jobs out there suited to your particular interests. They won't all be well paid but they won't require a 2 hour commute and work you find tedious either.
Accept compromise on some areas (i.e. lower pay or living with others) in order to gain on others (short commute).
Don't succumb to bitterness or blame others for your predicament, it doesn't help.
It's only going to get worse in the future.

Tell https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bania_%28caste%29 people in India to take their caste share of land and go build their own nation as per https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_Award
That's not right, it is a translator/compiler. It simply translates a python code string into a JS code string, and then calls `eval()` on the JS code string. The `eval()` step can optionally be skipped so that you can precompile. This is much easier to implement than an interpreter anyway.
On course to machine translation
This is the standard red pill/blue pill paradox, which one do you want to take? Reality can be very subjective. I sometime see what Michael sees, but I can understand why others don't.
Silicon Valley, help — America’s infrastructure just got a D+
Appreciation and valuable feedback are two different things. What value does "this is great; let me buy you a pretty unicorn!" add to the discussion? Criticism and disagreement are central to growth. We are not here satisfy each others' egos or make each other feel loved; we're here to criticize software and make it better. Constructive criticism is our way of saying: "I have spent time reading your code, and here is how you can make it better" -- I don't have the time to read everything, so the very fact that I took the time to read your code and write about it should make you feel appreciated.

That said, it is possible to go overboard and criticize something based on irrational hatred. At that point, you're just talking about trolls: it has nothing to do with developers not appreciating each others' work. Internet trolls have existed since the dawn of the internet, and there are plenty of resources on how to deal with them.

How you communicate your criticism is also important: there is no need to be overtly negative. Just point out what's wrong, and how to correct it; your job is done. Here's a recent instance where I've been overtly negative: the correct response is criticism of my style, as Junio has done [1].

[1]: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/22535...
I am trying to make the point that precisely because we live in a world that is unfair, defending unfairness when it is obvious will not help improve things.

Playing Devil's advocate: it wasn't the cruise companies who created the unfairness; they are just performing arbitrage. Eliminating it won't eliminate the unfairness; in fact, it might make it worse.
As it's been mentioned elsewhere in the thread, asking for base salary only is a bad idea.

I'd be happy to consider moving jobs for £80k~+, but £60k would be a huge step down, and yet I voted £40-49k because that's my base salary.

My company knows they can get away with paying me less because I have enough stock+bonus to make it worth it anyway (which I don't agree with, but it's still better than not being paid that at all)
I'm definitely not blaming the victims here. Certainly the fault lies with the drivers who were operating their vehicle recklessly and without regard for human life, I think a charge of negligent homicide or manslaughter is warranted in cases such as this and I think life in prison is likely not too harsh of a sentence. At worst Reisse is "guilty" of nothing other than inattention, which certainly nobody deserves death for.

That said, regardless of the assignment of culpability and wrongdoing I think it is fundamentally important for pedestrians (namely: all people) to understand that it is with in their power to dramatically reduce their risk of injury by developing defensive habits. At the end of the day it doesn't matter if you died noble and innocent, dead is dead.

By the same token, it's not ok to blame children for sexual abuse, but it is smart to educate them about the dangers and to empower them with the skills to be able to avoid it.
Unless there's something unique to your situation, CV, biometrics, 3d printing, etc. all have a fair number of jobs, too. Some using open source.
That's why everyone should toggle on showdead.

Deferring to taste police ought to be opt-in.