skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's almost impossible to say anything definitive about line width on web pages because the experience depends so much on viewport aspect ratio, device rotation, and surrounding content.

I agree. We know that margin width seems to make a difference in other contexts, so it seems likely that on small mobile devices where there is very little margin the other characteristics for optimum readability might need to be adjusted to take that into account. Clearly there is an inherent limit on the physical width of lines we can show on such devices anyway.

Blog pages seem to have standardised on a single central column between a half and two thirds of the viewport width. Text sizing covers a huge range from ~12pt up to 16pt or even 18pt.

It would be nice to see some real evidence about the effectiveness of single-column blog layouts, but first we'd have to choose some plausible alternatives to compare them with. There don't seem to be many "standardised" ones today, as other heavily text-based sites that use things like multi-column layouts tend to be in fields like news or e-commerce, where they aren't trying to present a single piece.

It would also be interesting to see a proper study about the effectiveness or otherwise of very large fonts and of thin/light fonts, as widely used on trendy blogs today. I suspect they would not be a resounding success, but I have nothing beyond anecdotal evidence to back that up.

Much as I love beautiful typography, I think it's only a deal-breaker when it goes horribly wrong.

Sadly, that is true of much design work. When you get it right, your site works well and no-one notices. When you get it wrong, it can be disastrous. Such is life. :-)
I guess I can't say that there were no consequences, since they were able to pay $2 billion to walk away scot free: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/outrageous-hsbc-se...

According to this analysis, that amounts to about 5 weeks of HSBC's income, to say nothing of total reserves/worth: http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2012/12/13/Too-Big-to-...

As far as I understand it, the new revelations coming out about HSBC are indeed more Europe-oriented, but are not limited to Europe in scope.
Well, you are proposing sanctions against a country which is largely responsible for defending your country. You don't see the disconnect? Further, you wrote about dependence on the U.S. with respect to IT, which seems to pale in comparison to the military dependence.

We fly drone strikes out of your country and you are worried about CPUs?
I haven't thought about Thunderbird in years! This is rather surprising to me. What's the draw for using Thunderbird over the web- and mobile-based clients like Inbox?
Are those figures for London, or are you seeing them UK-wide?
>I get asked a lot about what software consulting (aka freelancing) is like.

Are consulting and freelancing synonyms now? In my world, most "consultants" work for small or big (Accenture, one of the French corps, Deloitte...) consulting companies and don't have many of the problems mentioned in this blog post (but also likely have lower earning potential).
> nothing prevents him from either finding another more endearing programming job or working on his own thing.

Risk and lack of a safety net prevents people from working on their own thing.
Ask HN: Is Google weather working for you?
Nomad SMS – Receive a local SMS anywhere in the world
Journalists trade puff-pieces for leaks and exclusives. Only those in power typically have leaks to trade.
>I've been using Windows for over 20 years and I've had very few (exactly 2) personal battles with malware and those were on Windows 95 and 98.

Had tons on Windows XP, and several in 7.

>Why don't you try looking things up and scanning them before installing?

Can't and won't be bothered. What am I? The OS's servant?

I'd rather have an OS that doesn't get me viruses, either through enhanced security and sandboxes, or through scarcity of malware.

Plus, it's not even about "scanning" etc. Lots of adware for example comes in totally legitimate forms. Heck, even the base Windows install from some OEMs has ad- and spy-ware installed...
Bias != propaganda.

You definition of propaganda is overly specific. If you're waiting for leaflets to be dropped out of airplanes, you're going to be disappointed.

>unless the only viewpoint anyone is allowed to express is the one approved by the government.

That's totalitarianism, at least WRT the media and public discourse.
...and still it looks and behaves like we are in 2002.

Don't get me wrong, I like and use Thunderbird but sometimes I wish they would put more effort into improving the UI
There are lots of contracts in London with 500-700 GBP per day rates...Java/Ruby/Node and more. Those are for dev roles, not consulting roles.
Right. But who cares about the benefits when the difference is $4-6k per month? Most of those benefits (tech books and conferences, laptop, smartphones, software, etc) are valid tax deductions for software developers. I'll happily pay for those.

The UK, and many other EU countries, also have excellent ‘free’ healthcare.
I won't sell my soul, no matter how much it pays ;)
Why can't I update VLC 2.1.5 using 'Check for update' in OSX.
Nope. :/
Nah. :/
TL,DR: Node, Erlang, React, Flocks.JS, MySQL, and CloudFront.

For the frontend, I am writing a routable, cached SPA in React and d3, orchestrated with Flocks, stored in S3 and fronted with CloudFront, generated by Node, backed with MySQL (because it has semi-mature clustering.)

For the backend, I use a custom Erlang stack built on htstub and emysql.

The build process is orchestrated with gulp, uses eslint, vows, karma, and jsverify for testing, travis ci for CI/CD, and deploys automatically on full test passing. (I have extensive test coverage.)

I can use remarkably few tools to get the results I want. I am happy with the stack.

I have an alternative approach to handling multiple interfaces, as a replacement for responsive. I don't use media queries to do that. Instead I have a top level React layout control, and which top level control is invoked is based on the client. The same goal is suited, but it isn't jury rigged through CSS.
I can't speak for everyone, but I've experimented with Thunderbird because: (1) I didn't want to trust a third party with all of my emails, (2) I wanted a client that supported PGP, and (3) I wanted a client that would work offline when traveling.

I've since given up on PGP and offline access for the most part and have been using FastMail's web interface.
Confessions of a Former Agile Methodologist
For a trial of something on an even worse level, British (previously monopoly) ISP BT deployed something called Phorm[1].

I'd love to see the internal Lenovo emails that led to Superfish being part of their OEM build. No way they didn't know exactly what they were doing.

I was just hovering over the new Dell or the Carbon X1 as my next purchase. Decision made.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phorm
I've always considered consultants to be more on-site, but maybe that's because I didn't hear of freelancing much before the Internet and remote working.
Elon Musk's Hyperloop Takes Root in California
"most" = which ones?

List them
Sounds pretty mega to me alright.
I use Thunderbird every day, and I agree with you.

If they want to kill some low-hanging fruit, search is fundamentally broken. I've almost never found what I'm searching for -- it's reddit bad. It's usually better for me just to go log into that gmail account and search from there.
Take 20-30% off for outside M25 i.e. in line with cost of living reduction.
Some of these are grossly wrong or incomplete, e.g. the C# stuff[1]. Is there any way to contribute?

[1]: http://hyperpolyglot.org/cpp
local storage, multiple accounts, separate inboxes, doesn't try to be too clever
maybe its because I'm not interested in the problem domain at hand but I find these unreadable messes.
This has been my perception too; over the past couple of years we've been inundated with recruitment agencies trying to pass on these Ruby/Rails devs like its the new hot shit and all I've ever seen in my experience is spagetti codebases and sloppy work. Node is the same. It used to be PHP devs were this class (we refer to them as "enthusiastic ametuers" but the "brogrammer" name also equally applies; people who are just starting a career in development who dont know they dont know anything, or simply dont care in the case of brogrammers).

It's my understanding that the mood is simply that rails/ruby/node is toxic; its the same with what used to be SEO, they've all become UX snake oil salesmen.

As a Go dev, I'm crapping it that Go may be the next bandwagon jumped onto :( It kinda makes me glad when I see all those comments complaining about lack of generics!
> I've made life long friends with some of my clients. That, more than anything else on this list, has made consulting special to me.

Hah, I had the exact opposite experience freelancing straight out of college, and this was why I stopped and sought full-time employment.

Most of the people I was interacting with (clients, etc) were significantly older than me, and it was brutally isolating after awhile. Even barring the age barrier, there was always a definitive client/vendor line that seemed to prevent any meaningful relationship from developing.

I even tried a coworking space, but it was never quite the same for me since people were there to work mostly, and it's not like you were ever going to work together aside from some rare cases.

I did it for about a year and then resolved never to do it as a full-time thing ever again. The freedom attracted me, but (for me at least) the isolation was overwhelming.

Disclaimer: blah blah blah, my own experience and not yours necessarily, etc.
I wouldn't be surprised if Kimble made it himself. He's 31337.
It works, I know it and it handles my several GB mail archive with 1000+ folders with grace, on top of that it's simple and does not do more than it needs to.
It's true. My main field of work is the Enterprise world (and i'm feeling stuck on it).
I will take in account such recommendations.

Thank you
https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird-stabi...

more or less maintenance only
That might be true in London, but in Toronto essentially every major success story is Rails, Python, JS, and Go. Roughly in that order. The few Java code bases I've seen were horrendous.
GitHub: A quick Nimble CRM login class in PHP
We are using CBC as block cipher mode. I totally understand that open sourcing the complete code is the only way for you to review it and trust it completely. We decided to write a detailed report about the encryption and how we use it and will publish the report soon via Twitter.
Alternative Pages
Thunderbird is my go-to client in any company I work at if I can figure out how to make it work.

For those of you at companies with newer Outlook exchange servers( http://i.imgur.com/J31q7xo.png ) or the even newest-newer( http://i.imgur.com/7eX8S1e.png ), get davmail proxy server. http://davmail.sourceforge.net/ ...and you have to get the Lightning plugin to handle the exchange-calendar stuff.

____

Disclaimer: Don't ask me about how trustworthy davmail is with handling full access to you email account. I just know a lot of people use it and I've never heard negative. Though honestly, I wish mozilla would just acquire the project and provide a verified source & binary on their site. Or just do whatever davmail is doing directly in the thunderbird code.
Using open-uri? Check your code – you're playing with fire
£20k of income(sans VAT) per month is barely possible. If you're at the level of being paid £45k - you will not earn £20k per month during first year. £20k per month is ~ £900 per day @ 22 days per month, and that is paid to very well known consultants.

But what I will agree with is that the disparity of contractor pay and permanent pay in UK is staggering.
I don't meant to argue, just trying to explain the rules aren't as simple as meeting a quota. For instance if you submit 90 links to <random big subreddits> and 10 links to yourwebsite.com in <onespecificsubreddit> that subreddit may consider you to be spamming them.

I could no longer work within the 90/10 rule, it is just not appealing to me to use reddit that much right now although in the past I have helped moderate some of the largest subreddits and submitted many things I have created.

They have advertising you can use instead, you can target subreddits as well:

http://www.reddit.com/advertising
I did not necessarily mean exactly right now, but the Iraq war was obviously worth sanctions. Also distancing from the USA does not necessarily imply imposing sanction, but the US spying programs and the drone war are recent and current activities that make me want to get as far away from the USA as possible.
The NSA spying on Merkel (and other allied world leaders, but someone mentioned they're German in comment to this as well), off the top of my head?

Or for humanitarian reasons, same as we claim when we impose them elsewhere? Examples such as our continued use of torture both abroad and local (especially since solitary confinement is viewed as torture when it goes on longer than a few weeks), our continued life without parole imprisonment of non-violent offenders for miniscule crimes (3 strikes and you're out), our still imposing the death penalty, etc.

Or for our breaking international law in the various wars and attacks the US has undertaken without international backing? I mean, we're basically a rogue state in that regard, just, you know, big enough no one responds to it, same as Russia with the Crimea.

What exactly do you think it would take to deserve sanctions, if not those?
Having a client for all my mail accounts while keeping them separated. Offline functionality. Also, signed/encrypted mail.
I did not, thanks for the link!
"This isn’t a partisan issue. Conservatives who believe in U.S. sovereignty should be outraged that ISDS would shift power from American courts, whose authority is derived from our Constitution, to unaccountable international tribunals. Libertarians should be offended that ISDS effectively would offer a free taxpayer subsidy to countries with weak legal systems. And progressives should oppose ISDS because it would allow big multinationals to weaken labor and environmental rules."

(from the Warren article)
"Private" is not the best word to use here. Gun shops are required to maintain logs. Outside of that, transactions between individuals aren't involuntarily logged (the poorly named "gunshow loophole").
This gets brought up a lot but virtually no one in the extreme Warmist community takes this risk seriously, which is weird because a) it isn't entirely implausible and b) they talk about it a lot.

Yet we can tell they don't take it seriously, because they are adamantly opposed to nuclear power, which would defang coal, a major contributor to climate change.

One of the reasons otherwise reasonable people don't take AGW seriously is this kind of disconnect, in which the people who make the most noise about it are so clearly, obviously and transparently inconsistent between what they say they believe ("AGW runs a serious risk of creating civilization-ending events") and what they actually believe ("Global industrial capitalism is the root of all evil").

This is unfortunate, because AGW is a real problem, and should be addressed aggressively by both technological (nuclear, solar, etc) and political (carbon tax) means. But neither will happen until people start actually taking it seriously, instead of simply using it as a stick to beat some political hobby horse.

Denialists are little better, of course, but I honestly think it would be possible to get them mostly on side--and I have had some success in doing so--by sincere and consistent arguments that separate the science from the rabidly anti-capitalist, anti-industrial proposals for solution.
If you can use templates, the decision of which function to call can be done at compile time and you don't need virtual calls. Virtual calls are useful when the decision must be done at runtime.
version 38? I am on version 31 and T-Bird says it's up to date.
Anecdotal evidence on both sides is anecdotal.

Ruby is past it's hype and others are taking up the space.
Node.js is very good at replacing Ruby for quick development and Typesafe's Play works better for Java shops.
Spawning Players with a Poisson Process
We're all brain prostitutes so our soul is already sold. What remains is merely comfort, which .Net provides.
Ok you got me there. :-)

I just think that this is a company with no product, no business model, horrendous business practices and somehow their valuation is still higher than the entire market they operate in. At least their not selling the data to the IRS, right?
We were getting really close to converting our RDS instance from MySQL -> PG, but now with Amazon Aurora being the spiffy super-scalable/etc. RDS engine, we'll probably end up moving to that when/if needed.

Which is a mixed blessing; Aurora sounds great, but I was looking forward to getting back into PG after years of RDS being MySQL-only.
How to Get into Tech If Youre Not an Obvious Fit
I started using Thunderbird for the first time in many years a few days ago. I honestly really like it. I don't know what's motivating the many others to switch back, but privacy concerns have to be one of them.

Pros:

* For times when I have slow or no internet, I can still read and compose email, and it will be quite responsive
* It works with all the mail accounts I use, like my gmail account I'm trying to depricate, and the fastmail account that now hosts my own email address
* The Enigmail plugin is probably close to the best UI one can create for GPG
* While the UNIX romantic in me would prefer to use Mutt all the time, even my finely tuned Mutt setup can't seamlessly deal with things like HTML emails all the time.

Cons:

* It's a huge software package, and often takes quite a bit of memory
* I don't currently know how to make it tie into a keyring for storing passwords, so I either have to let it store my email account passwords in plain text, or essentially have a second master password
* It's not the prettiest software in the world, but it's not bad either. the UI is at this point pretty unremarkable, so while it doesn't amaze, it doesn't confuse too much either
* I don't know its keyboard shortcuts, or even if they exist, well yet, so I'm using the mouse a lot
Connect superhumans who are changing the way we live – it's tinder for startups
"has come to the conclusion that on-going stability is the most important thing, and that continued innovation in Thunderbird is not a priority for Mozilla’s product efforts. "

I absolutely agree with this. I really don't want my e-mail client to be innovative. I just want it to work, connect to as many of my accounts as possible and keep everything separate (I hate unified inboxes with a passion that could melt the heart of stars).

I do wish it got a visual update every once in a while, and they fixed search. But other than that it does what I need it to do and it gets out of the way the rest of the time.
In my book, different but overlapping terms. A consultant can be a freelancer or can work for either a consulting firm or a product company that has a consulting arm. In IT, "consultant" tends to suggest on-site work though that certainly doesn't have to be the case. And a freelancer can include consultants and programmers but also includes, for example, many writers.
No idea if this applies to the UK, but in the Netherlands the word is that bigger companies have been switching from outsourcing to agencies and contractors to creating/expanding their own in-house teams.

With online services now fully established at senior management level as part of the core business (software eating the world etc) and no longer seen as "projects", this is natural development.

And it's not just contractors that feel the consequences, it's also the specialized agencies that can no longer get those big fat contracts building web apps for established companies.
To rule out B12, take some B12. If you can, avoid the generic cyanoco- type, get the methylcobalamin. You can just put it under your tongue.
Whoops, by os.Sync() I meant *File.Sync() of course, aka fsync.
Syria is a failed state since it is in the middle of a civil war. The USA is not a failed state because the government still effectively governs. And from my perspective, many European countries appear to be more xenophobic than the USA. France's crazy anti-Muslim laws are a good example.
That version only works with 1.8. There is an updated fork though, sexp_processor:

https://github.com/seattlerb/sexp_processor
I use it to read mailing lists via Gmane's NNTP portal: nntp://news.gmane.org I wish there was an addon that synced my "read messages". It is difficult to keep up to date on popular mailing lists unless you look at them throughout the day (and that means different devices/locations for me).
There's really not a thing I can't do in TcL. I move back and forth from Python and TcL all of the time. I had Tcl before I had Python and it's quite mature which makes sense considering how long it's been around.
This article is written by a major dissenter in the US Govt, and published in one of the most read newspapers in the country, trying to demystify and make public the actions of the government and trade partners. Perhaps it's just the exception that proves the rule.
In which way is the USA defending Germany and against whom? Besides local businesses profiting from the presence of US soldiers people either don't care about these military bases or want to see them gone because of drone strikes from there or the opportunity to have spying equipment there. Getting rid of the US military bases would not really hurt anyone, losing access to US IT technology would hurt a lot.
In my experience Ruby has become a niche thing. It never moved on to the enterprise at scales that all the hype-men wanted it to almost 10 years ago. And the startups have found other tools.
I like its RSS feeds management. I follow lots of blogs and discussion forums, and being able to organize them by subject into multiple folder levels is a major convenience for me.
10 years of OpenStreetMap
via @cloudrail
ARTIQ – Open source control system for quantum information experiments
I did something similar in a personal project[0], but to avoid reimplementing things like lists and resizable buffers and such over and over again but maintain a sort of "type safety.*" It's a step down from C++ templates but it works.

[0] https://github.com/noobermin/ch
Machine Learning Done Wrong
I think some level of integration testing is always a good thing, but spinning up all dependent services just so you can test yours leads to all kinds of problems, even in microservices. You end up with cascading dependencies.

At scale, some level of stubbing is required to test.
With the exception of discriminating against certain protected classes, American companies are generally free to decide who they want as a customer and who they don't. You don't have a right to credit card processing any more than you have a right to eat at a fancy restaurant or hire a developer -- imagine if contract developers weren't allowed to turn down clients.