skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We didn't need this test for HN, did we?
Well, you only get worse SERP for mobile searches don't you?
As long as google delivers good results people will use it,
I am not that worried
I'm happy Kimelman got the best out of it. It's nice to read experiences that don't involve any kind of intimate assault.

The system is designed not to rehabilitate, but to dehumanize the inmates, while guards often support the lowest forms of behavior.
"I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse." Charlemagne

I had learnt this line as attributed to Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (king of both Spain as Carlos I, and of Germany as Karl V). Charlemagne could hardly have spoken those languages as they didn't quite yet exist around the year 800 A.D. when he lived, but spoke Rhenish Franconian, Latin, and some Greek [1]. Charlemagne was the first Holy Roman Emperor which could explain the confusion, but Charles V lived around 1500 A.D, seven centuries later.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlemagne#Language

I have quoted those words myself for a number of years, but when checking before commenting I found out that he didn't ever say exactly that, but according to reports some 40 years after his death:
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_V,_Holy_Roman_Emperor#...

"When Emperor Charles V used to say, as I hear, that the language of the Germans was military; that of the Spaniards pertained to love; that of the Italians was oratorical; that of the French was noble".

"Indeed another, who was German, related that the same Charles V sometimes used to say: if it was necessary to talk with God, that he would talk in Spanish, which language suggests itself for the graveness and majesty of the Spaniards; if with friends, in Italian, for the dialect of the Italians was one of familiarity; if to caress someone, in French, for no language is tenderer than theirs; if to threaten someone or to speak harshly to them, in German, for their entire language is threatening, rough and vehement".

Thanks for triggering me into correcting my misunderstanding. :-)
The whole business model of Google is knowledge about what users want to see on the web. And their judgements about it are context-specific: they are true for the current situation, when the mobile browsers work as they do. If Google is wrong, and users want the sites that are _not_ optimized for mobile, they will lose their market share.

However, if they are right, and the users _do_ want to see sites optimised for mobile, it means that while you are right technically about how mobile browsers are supposed to work, and how sites are supposed to work, the real users just don't agree with you.
Moby Dick is on GitHub
This comment from one of the original consulting engineers is really interesting:

"Bio-Med Engineer Langhorne PA 13 hours ago
I worked in an engineering design consultancy that was contracted early on to help productize the ZPM design, and as such am intimately familiar with their initial concepts. In my opinion, the founders were initially earnest and dedicated but also naive and lacking in engineering judgement. They confused the ability to raise money with the ability to make sound engineering and technical decisions. Falling in love with one's ideas is a trap into which many inventors fall, and ZPM fell hard.

Additionally, I believe that ZPM received a lot of questionable advice from people who did not have their best interests at heart, and were swayed by strong personalities.

But the early backers - particularly the engineers - should have had the sense to realize that open-source firmware that is intended to control a consumer product that delivers scalding hot water is a fundamentally BAD idea, and that using a PID loop to manage the process is totally unnecessary.

What this article highlights is that Mr. Polyakov's talent is in raising money and expectations. It is unfortunate that neither his ethics, nor his engineering abilities can match those talents."
I think one thing that will greatly help mobile experience for me is to add a reddit-style collapse comment section toggler. On mobile devices (and in some cases on desktops), it will help reach the lower comments easily without having to scroll a lot.
I just watched this. It's fantastic, thanks!

To others, do not be intimidated by the length. If you have or know someone with ADHD you've got to watch this and get the friends and family to watch too.
It's a great feeling to solve problems and build a $thing that works. For all values of $thing.

When I did my high-altitude balloon flight it felt great. Sure it had been done before, the electronics weren't that hard, etc. etc. But it worked and now photos taken from the stratosphere by my $thing adorn the living room.

http://blog.jgc.org/2011/04/gaga-1-flight.html
If anyone from Google is reading: text entry boxes on Chrome on iOS are suboptimal.

http://imgur.com/XpygcTq

http://imgur.com/cAjceFY

The address bar takes up a lot of vertical space that could be better used to show more lines of text. That big block of empty white space on the previous item next item close menu bar is also wasted.

If Google really wants to fix browsing on mobile they might want to look at their own products as well as using their seo powers.
They should not. A mobile browser should follow standards defined by people who thought about this kind of stuff. Mobile browsers render "desktop-designed" webpages this way because they should so according to the HTML/CSS/JS specs.

As a developer, you should define which content should scale and/or resize according to browser viewport width and pixel density: Better known as "Responsive".
It still blows my mind that the text on the HN homepage is unreadably too small on my Samsung Galaxy S4. Surely you guys have enough money and/or technical chops to fix that?
The dynamic branch of OOP actually fared pretty well in Python, javascript, ruby, even in the presence of Java. As to why the others faltered (objective C being popular just because of Apple, smalltalk always being niche), I can't really say.
BroadcastChannel API – Communicating between tabs
Pilot to fly solar plane across Pacific for 5 days, 5 nights
The whole 'not mobile friendly' meme really needs to die. The sites are never at fault, a mobile browser is entirely capable of rendering sites however they see fit and to ignore or incorporate any or all elements of the style sheets and mark-up that a site supplies.

The pixel-perfect coupling that people expect between what a site should look like according to the designers and how that site is rendered by the browsers is an illusion, that's not the way the web was supposed to work at all, web sites provide information and loose markup hints and browsers then render that information in the best way suitable for the device and its user.

Don't blame the website, blame the browser instead.

Ironically, looking at ancient (pre-CSS, pre table based layouts) websites through modern browsers gives you instant adaptive design because all there was was content, no eye candy.

If we had wanted pixel based rendering we could have done a damn sight better than CSS, style sheets and markup are hints, not ultimatums to be obeyed or failure will occur.

Just think about the burden that these demands make on older websites, websites that worked perfectly well in the past suddenly need to be modified in order to be displayed properly, that's a total inversion of the way things are supposed to work. Old content and older websites should be displayed with as high fidelity as possible on newer browsers and devices. You can't fault the makers of old websites for not being 'future compatible' but you can fault the makers of new devices and browsers for not being compatible with the past.
Apart from accidental downvoting I never had any problems with it. Get a browser that nicely reflows and that locks horizontal scrolling nicely (not too much, not too little) and it's a breeze to read and participate. I love that I can choose the font-size and zoom level myself, notblindthankyouverymuch.
People don't choose a language. They choose a platform (or stack or environment). If you want to evaluate a language look at the language's platform. Currently Rust is not part of any platform but may become the language of the 'Mozilla platform' in the future.
Google makes these kinds of decisions to improve their service: Finding the information you need. If you look up some information about bananas on your 4" touchscreen device and 2 sites provide info on them: A mobile site and a "regular" website, I want the mobile/responsive website, not the "regular" one.
Not as simple as that I don't think. Despite figures about decline in road traffic, there is a big division between London, where the traffic decline has been most (indeed, Wikipedia provides no ex-London numbers) and the rest of the country, where public transport is much worse. For example half the bus journeys in England took place in London.

The UK currently buys more new cars than anywhere else in Europe as well, partly due to credit availability, but clearly there is demand, and there is a huge pro road pro motorist lobby, as is clear when fuel taxes are increased.

So I think the DoT have ended up reflecting largely this pro car part of the UK.
Compiling Objective-C on Windows is not such a big deal. The huge thing here is that Microsoft has apparently reimplemented the Apple frameworks, because that's the only way they could port over existing iOS code.

I'm extremely curious to find out how much of UIKit is available on Windows Phone. It might be something disappointing like "well, if you stick to old pre-iOS7 methods and don't use new frameworks or AVFoundation or anything, most of your code will compile"... If they're really tracking the latest iOS on this, it's an amazing feat.

It's worth noting that Microsoft also has a companion product for Android, the "Universal Windows Platform Bridge for the Android Runtime" a.k.a. Project Astoria:

https://dev.windows.com/en-us/uwp-bridges/project-astoria

The difference seems to be that the iOS porting toolkit is an SDK, while the Android version is a complete runtime. So you can take an existing Android app (.apk file) and run it directly on Windows Phone, whereas the iOS app will need to be recompiled in Visual Studio.

I find the Android bridge to be the really exciting news. Now every phone vendor except Apple supports Android apps! I wrote a blog post about it a few days ago when it was announced:
http://blog.neonto.com/2015/04/29/android-is-the-new-win32-t...
Is this still being developed? The last commit on github was 6 months ago.
"Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good."

W. H. Auden
I see 3 schools of thought:
1) HN should be more mobile-friendly, so I can read it.
2) HN should be more of a platform on top of which users can build tools to use it, so let's build one.
3) Why not both?

I think both iOS and Android have already a plethora of user-made apps. (some of them ok, some of them not ok)

On a tablet i prefer the HN website to any of the apps currently available.
On a phone, I think there are a few good Android apps and no good enough iOS apps...

What is the best HN experience on mobile? I think there's need for better understanding of what we "want" from mobile, apart from the obvious things (i.e. readability)
I was diagnosed with ADHD as a child. That is partially why I created this webapp: http://focusr.co/. It helps you focus on one thing at a time, which can be hard enough for people even w/o this diagnosis.
The Galaxy S4 came out well after HN was built, why should the burden be on HN, why don't you say 'Surely Samsung would have the money and/or technical chops to make a product compatible with the web as existed prior to when the device was launched?'.

edit: hello downvoters, would you be equally upset that a windows 95 machine would refuse to run office 2000?
Handicap eyeshades for daydreamers. I think Harrison Bergeron is about that.
How to enable YouTube’s new transparent player
This 13 min video [1] also by Dr Russell Barkley is something of a summery, but the longer one is absolutely worth watching.

1: https://youtu.be/_tpB-B8BXk0
Mindfulness for your work: http://focusr.co/ (i.e., instead of being mindful to your breath or some aspect of your environment, you can practice mindfulness by bringing your attention back to your current task).
It's obviously not a matter of money/chops, but that of the priorities.
I don't think Mozilla plans to create a Rust-based platform, but the community is already making libraries that are useful at various levels of a stack.
My rocky first 24hrs with the Apple Watch
How to fix the CFAA
How does this theory affect the BRICS? (edit: The atlantic has an opinion here: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/10/the-rich...)
This is beyond cool. Are there any known side-effects to the sensor?
Maybe the S10 will have a 12" screen
Interesting. They'd need to pay me quite a lot of money for a weeks worth of effort.
It seems many app designers makes the mistake of treating the watch as an phone strapped to your wrist instead of a device with a different use case.

Also it seems Apple has missed the mark one some fairly common use cases, like having sleep & don't disturb modes, or being able to dismiss multiple notifications.

I was thinking about watches and realized one mode I'd like is that only show notifications when prompted (like a force push). Then you could make notifications pull rather than push UX wise and don't have to be interrupted. Good for dinners etc
As long as we have suburbs we cannot erradicate cars: suburbs lifestyle imply that we use cars.

So the decline of cars proves the decline of suburbs. Thank god.
Sure, but how hard is it to write some basic CSS? I mean we are talking about making the text bigger when viewed on mobile devices, right?
It might, who knows. The compatibility onus is on the device manufacturers, not on the websites. That's the world upside down.
You could enlarge the text?
Not necessarily - in America yes that is the way things work at the moment, but not all over the world. There are may suburbs with good public transport where having a car is less necessary.
I live in Europe and I can't imagine not owning a car. My city has quite good public transportation, but the flexbility and independence of car wins all the time. Using bus+train it takes me 1h to get to work one way, while by car it takes me 15m, additionally I do grocery shopping and other things on the way home. Time saving isn't however the major reason, but the feeling that I can go whenever I want, wherever I want.
I used to be part of this phenomenon. First, I lived in the city center where owning/using a car is just a drag. Then I moved to the suburbs and still resisted buying one as a matter of principle. But a little less than two years ago, I made the transition and now I happily own a car.

The reason?

1) Public transport in my city sucks.

2) The shopping infrastructure has moved out of the center of my community to the edges.

And it's not like I didn't try. As I said above, for quite a number of years I refused to use a car even after I moved out of the city center because I was convinced that individual car usage just isn't sustainable. But as I get older, I feel my spare time becoming more and more valuable. And in my particular case, going to and from work takes >1h each way, while with the car it's a good 20 minutes drive, saving me about 1h20 per day. This is because my work is in another suburb which by public transport you can only get to by first going into the city center and then out again. With the car, you can circumvent the city completely. (Unfortunately, the part of town where my work is is not a very nice place to live, or else I could probably bike.)

The second part is shopping. When I was younger, I would just walk to the next store and buy the few items I would need that day. But I was single back then. Now, there aren't any stores in walking distance any more, but my partner and I also require more stuff than when I lived alone.

I still believe it's a bad idea that every household owns more than one car on average. And I've always wondered: of all of the privately owned cars in this country, how many are actually moving at any given point in versus how many are parked?

But I have kind of given up hope that broad acceptance of public transport would become the norm "automatically", simply because people should realize that individual traffic is unsustainable. Now I think the only way this will ever become a reality is through force -- namely, governmental regulation. Of course, this is not on anybody's agenda at this point (anybody in power, I mean) and will not be in any foreseeable time. I don't believe individual car use will experience a measurable reduction in my life time, sadly.
> However not so many people are starting families when compared to former times,

This has not been the case for quite a while, and I would claim the opposite: there are more newborns in 2015 than in any year since 1971.
Laptop Recommendations
What is the best laptop to buy as a computer science and electrical engineering student? Keeping in mind: portability, performance and affordability.
There is certainly the possibility that life is just incredibly improbable, and the only reason we think otherwise is oberservers bias.
When I switch to "no style" in Firefox, HN becomes pretty responsive. The only 2 problems I can see are that the textarea on top still has a fixed width and that the comments are not indented.

Mobile browsers should offer a custom style option, or at least a "no style" option like FF does.

Sidenote: Is it possible at all to have horizontal scrolling websites that Google consideres mobile friendly? Some websites are intended to have a horizontal scroll. What are they supposed to do?
I would assume it would be bad API design in Rust too.

For all use-cases that are possible this kind of API it would be safe to use a const reference to a vector it C++ too. Of course with the difference that in Rust the correct use can be statically verified.

But I think for a really flexible API that allows parallel modification you should go for a copy or some kind of immutable-vector oder copy-on-writer-vector type in both languages.
Granted, the use of word "bugs" was a bit too much.

I consider it a bug when ´Environment.getExternalStorageState´ tells me the SDCard is mounted, when the SD-slot is empty. That was because parts of Samsung's internals storage where referred to as external storage.

I consider it very bad design when Android allows me to write Views that cause layout-passes multiple times during construction. (Because of setTypeFace). That Views are riddled with methods which cause re-layouts mixed with others that don't. There should be an annotation for this.
I know, nowadays there's a logging-statement if that occurs, that wasn't there in Android 4.2 IIRC.

On a complicated app you can either do proper separation of concern and compose everything in nested Views, but you have to throw everything back into a single View to get more performance. Or you write your own layout-manager which is what I did.

It's impossible to define constraints on animations. I can't tell android, hey that view is going to change it's height, but not it's width and it won't affect anything else, so save yourself some time and stop calculating the height of this letter for the 546th time in the last 10 seconds. rant rant

Hardware-Acceleration is a different matter. I ended up disabling it completely, because it would accelerate some animations, fades and make some other parts jittery. Most fine-grained layer-control specified in the Guide doesn't seem to affect anything.

And so on, and so forth.

Android development is painful compared to other SDKs and that's why app-quality is so low. You can claim that stems from confusion: no it doesn't, i've read large parts of the (UI) code by now and I've written software in many languages for many years.

Or ignorance: Maybe in the sense that I refuse the reason for all this: That most of Android was baked hastily in the beginning to get something out and fixing mistakes which would require most APPs to be redone is close to impossible. Android is the new Windows. ;)
I fear we are part of a small self-selecting group that has chosen the convenience to living in densely populated, well connected cities and are relatively well-off. I doubt you'll hear a lot about "peak car" outside these small groups or areas.

For many, I suspect the car represents a great deal of freedom in exactly the same way that not owning a car means to this self-selecting group: making a decent living, access and comfort, etc.

The real aim to force the decline of car use is sustainability, efficiency and equality. It's not going to happen without huge investments and will affect the whole economy negatively for decades, which is why Governments shy away from doing anything very serious about it.

In the meantime, I'm also happy to not own a car, cycle to work, etc. But if I lived outside central London I would get one immediately.
What mobile browser do you use?
How does that make sense?

The device's web browser should attempt to adapt the page to fit the device rather than the site telling the browser how it should adapt to the size of the screen.
I want to say "if you can't see when it'll come, you're not really predicting it", but that's too easy.

I wonder if there's a way to "far-short" a stock. Like, if you think the stock in question will "eventually" go up to $1k, you can buy now and sell when it does. But if you think it'll "eventually" drop to $10, you can't easily trade on that, right?

Maybe the way to go is to buy everything _but_ that stock (via overlapping index funds?), then sell once the stock drops to $10 and reevaluate from there? I don't know.
Except most browsers don't reflow the text correctly so you have to horizontally scroll.
It's very difficult to have sustainable/economical public transportation with the population density existent in the suburbs.
Interesting dilemma. I had assumed that re-writing in another language basically meant you were copyright free (as long as you're not literally transcribing or automatically translating), but it appears it's not that simple: http://imranontech.com/2006/12/04/are-algorithms-copyrightab...
Are algorithms copyrightable? (2006)
When someones only way to have a better or normal life is to get into military it's hard for me to judge them as harsh.
Either I don't understand you or we're in agreement. Yes, the device's web browser should do the adaptation, sites can tell browsers whatever they want and browsers are totally free to ignore that information, after all the browser and the device have more information to work with.
Getting started with aws-sdk-go and CloudFormation
I feel like if they got rich off predicting the crisis, they should advertise that a lot more loudly.

It's the one undeniable evidence of predictive success there is in the market.

Of course, that might be stupid from a PR perspective. Which is terrible.
Maybe it's not an issue for everyone. I'm quite happy with how it is.
Joel Spolsky's twelve things have become known as the *Joel Test". http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html
Wow what a great site to help sites work better for mobile.