skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>"Accessibility costs money" is a popular thing to say, but I'm not convinced that needs to be true. Okay, fine, captioning/transcribing videos I'll give you,

Even that one is overstated. Sure, taking some existing video, and treating it as the only representation of the content, and then trying to transcribe it -- that's expensive.

But virtually every such video (esp. lectures) intended for conveying information is going to correspond to some text equivalent, and they can just post that in a place that's easy to find. Not only is it cheap, many users who can hear will prefer that version.

I think it's just a widespread attitude problem (for lack of a more refined diagnosis). It's not just big institutions, but discussion forums where some users will stubbornly link a video as their only citation, and won't even take the time to summarize the key point they think it's substantiating.
Both of my parents are retired. My father spends his time with his amateur radio, writes magazine articles for niche publications (about amateur radio), works around the house, and sometimes consults with startups from his former field. My mother spends her time reading novels, taking care of grandchildren, visiting family members, and volunteering.

Retirement seems like a good deal to me. It's not an inability to do things greater than yourself, it's the freedom to choose your pursuits without economic constraints (ideally).

Owning a boat, and sailing for pleasure sounds like a lovely hobby. I don't see anything wrong with aspiring to spend time that way.
I don't disagree with that. But I do think the lack of free speech/press/elections is a basic foundational problem which will hamper progress on the rest of these problems.
Not the OP, but I know there is at least one guy who's delved quite deeply into the concept of multi-dimensional time:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSbZM83_FycPZNJqcFYzW...
That's horrible. I hope the worker was reported and sent to prison.
One thing I realized about writing maintainable code applies just as well to designing accessible interfaces: the right habits get you 80% of the way, with no real cost beyond developing the habits. Getting into the right habits is an O(1) investment that pays off by making everything you produce more accessible.

Adding alt tags to images, using high contrast colors for text, writing clean, well-structured markup... all these things don't take significant time on top of your normal work as long as you do them right away. They also have additional benefits like making the site easier to parse for search engines.
> "oh, a women's python group? Can I come? I'm into that kind of woman"

But that's funny, depends on who said it and how well you know them. Between friends or close colleagues, VERY crass and 'vulgar' things are said for laughs. Or maybe they were being honest? Or... it's offensive and representative of sexism in tech. The choice is yours.
> She [...] did not say what was right

> If you want to know if a survey respondent is transgender, you need to explicitly ask that question.

How is this not saying what is right?
I think Tesla's and Elon Musk's response of publicly attacking this woman almost certainly indicates that they are at fault.

If this woman's claims were false they would do best to keep quiet and wait for the legal process. They have a huge advantage with both the money to pay lawyers and many fawning media outlets willing to support them so if they were in the right they would be guaranteed to win if they just waited it out.

Going on the offensive is dangerous because it makes them look bad and draws more attention to the story.

Attacking this woman would be very stupid unless they are actually in the wrong, in which case it makes perfect sense as an attempt to intimidate other employees into not speaking out.
As a visually impaired person, I can honestly say one of the best things is when accessibility is built into application frameworks.

It's not perfect but it gets you 90% of the way there in a lot of apps that wouldn't implement the features otherwise.

For example, most apps that are built with Microsoft frameworks automatically support high contrast and narrator.

The super awesome part about this for me is if accessibility is built in at the framework level I can develop start to finish with the accessibility features enabled. I don't have to struggle with an inaccessible app until the features are"in".
Why the hell are we now putting CSS in Javascript? I'm losing my mind with web developers trying to control everything in the world with client-side javascript.

What a mess.
That's actually not a bad idea. Maybe we could somehow organize a class action lawsuit.

Perhaps if it hits them in the pockets the message will be loud and clear?
What if the brain operated more like a neural network than a calculator? Your second point seems to raise another, separate issue, whether or not knowledge gained can be applied in an unrelated context, or even if these two calculations would be performed in the same ways by the brain, such that training in one yields greater efficiency in the other. I'd wager that practicing hand eye coordination would yield greater efficiency in other task related to processing visual input, maybe video games.
I am browsing Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools book.

It is remarkable how the prices of maybe three out of four items has doubled in the last four years.

Maybe the market has simply bifurcated.
Technically, considering a long enough timescale, a brain is the Universe trying to understand itself.
Important reading. More people are going to have to make hard choices like this as the months unfold, I'd imagine.
> they did so by making the bulbs better (brighter) in a way that made consumers want those bulbs.

Brighter and more efficient.
That's hardly the biggest problem IMO.

What bewilders me most is the number of engineers and designers who can't empathize with how their users might interact with the unspeakably bad UX they're putting together.
Anyone remember the unbreakable old AT&T landline phones? AT&T owned the phone, you just leased it from them, so they were completely indestructible. They weren't pretty, but they were bulletproof and you could slam the receiver down on a telemarketer without worrying about it getting damaged.

So yeah, you're completely right. If people didn't own their own hardware, if it was owned by the company and leased, we'd likely see more incentive to make sure they lasted.

Then again, companies discovered that you can lease something to someone and then charge them full price if/when they break it, so maybe not.
I hadn't noticed before but... Please do not recommend that people use "stage-1 features". Maybe if it is your own money, but not if you do it with other people's money.
"As I've understood the concept for something like a decade, PIPs are almost universally understood to be a soft form of firing."

FWIW, they've never been at any company i've managed at, or org i've belonged to :)

I certainly believe such companies exist, i'm not stupid.
I just am not sure I believe they are as prevalent as you do.

The only question in the room (from either HR or the manager) has always been "how do we help this person get better".

In fact, there were cases a PIP was decided against because it wasn't going to be effective in helping.

We simply offered fork in the road instead.

As for "sabotaging relationships", in every successful PIP i've seen, the person is still working at the company years later.
So ....

Apparently i'm just very lucky ;)

(which is, of course, within the realm of possibility)
Spotted the salty libtard cuck!
Sorry, I was doing something dumb with javascript on those, so if you were browsing with it off or were blocking resource loads from ajax.googleapis.com, it wouldn't work. I think it's fixed now.

Here's a direct link to the app: https://www.realartists.com/builds/2.0/Ship.app.zip
It's a necessary part of human-readability, for one.
Do you think writing metrics would help writers?
Ask HN: Will anything ever truly integrate and replace email&chat?
I checked it out the last time it was posted and I feel this will be really interesting when it has components. Not sure about its utility (for me) until then.
By not breaking the defaults you make something ugly. By making something ugly people won't come again. Hence accessibility does cost money. Add the occasional ungrateful guy who will sue you because you forgot a caption and I get why people don't try to accomodate more to a niche that won't be lucrative anyway.
> I had to abandon the "keep knowledge in my head" paradigm in 1990 or so and shift to the "problem solver" model.

That is what I aspire to. I think I'm doing well in this regard for how far I am into my career, but any advice you have in this regard would be appreciated by me (and others presumably).
This is baseless speculation. Corporations do and people accept all sorts of things including wage cuts.
The one that hops to mind immediately for me is "Papers, Please", where the player is an immigration agent that must verify documents for those wishing to enter a fictional country.
The rule is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or adding a parenthetical remark saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important...Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.
GitNotifier – Email notifications for selected GitHub repository/profile events
Why do these discussions always devolve into talks about punching people or getting punched? I can't get through a day without somebody suggesting violence is the only response to get somebody to think like them.

If you don't want these "programs" to exist at the professional level, you have to go all the back to college and high school. You can only continue to treat symptoms through affirmative action, because that is the cycle we're stuck in. That is the disease you are identifying. People who are propped up by outside assistance will naturally continue to depend on those props and leech resources at a disproportionate rate.

When these props are removed, the whole thing comes crashing down and we'll be forced to face the reality that these issues can't be fixed from a top down approach. Hiring more women or minorities into tech won't trickle down into incentivizing more women/minorities to major in Computer Science. Accepting more women/minorities into CS programs won't encourage more women/minorities to become interested in nerdy stuff in high school.

The real disease is third party intervention. Thinking all the world's problems can be solved as long as it looks like somebody's doing something for a long enough period of time. All that does is allow under-qualified individuals to shit the pool for the demographic that they represent and reinforce negative perspectives until people who pay for productive work can't turn a blind eye and then get punched in the face I suppose.
You don't seem to want to have this discussion in good faith and want to continue returning to reductionist "gotcha! we have non-NW Euro cultures too!" when I explicitly prefaced and qualified what I was saying multiple times to try to avoid these pointless gotchas. You obviously have an agenda you wish to push, and whether or not that agenda has a lot of support from science or history doesn't seem of interest to you, so I too will leave the discussion here.
I really like the look of the app. It's nice to see established well developed desktop interface concepts applied well.

The first link in the blog post should really link to the home page. A download link is unexpected and unwelcome for someone who's trying to figure out what Ship is for the very first time.
I am a succesful, ambitious person by any measure and would do nothing but chill on a boat all day if I could.
I like having events where women can get together without getting hit on or talked down to and where you've often encountered the same kinds of problems.

However. At my last job, there was just constant pressure from HR to go to these "Women in Tech" things that had nothing to do with writing code. I have three kids and a full-time job -- if I'm missing time with my kids and making my husband do more than his share, I need to be learning something both new and awesome.

One day, I may have time to mentor or help recruit or just mingle for free hummus (it's always goddamn hummus at the women's things). That day is so not now.
Its not secret, if you want to use the pentagons toys and personnel and facilities then they have to have script approval and will make suggestions if they don't approve. And those suggestions make the film a recruitment tool and propaganda mouthpiece. They request positive depictions of the military, the military solving the problems, etc.

I have also noticed they tend to carry a negative depiction of the other civilian branches of the government especially the CIA, "they made the problem/they tied our hands and now we gotta clean it up" seems a consistent theme.
But in the 50s you weren't buying a new iPhone every few years, or a desktop/laptop computer or a tablet, or multiple TVs, or a cell phone contract, or an Internet contract, or cable TV, or Netflix.

As our purchasing power has decreased and inflation has increased, we've also invented a lot more expensive stuff to spend our fewer and fewer dollars on.
Microcontainer manifesto
Is there any evidence that these movements actually get any results? To me it just seems like tokenism.
I am astonished how quickly it was reviewed and published. Is this common for journals on cosmology? It has been some years but I remember that submissions to e.g. Phys.Rev.E could take a long time till they would be published.
Without making any observations for or against chiropractors in general, or yours in particular, reading, "consistently seeing my x-rays" (of your spine) prompts me to share

"In this investigation, cervical spine films gave rise to radiation doses that are similar to those of chest x-rays. However, lumbar spine radiographs generated effective radiation doses that were approximately an order of magnitude greater than these other studies. In both the cervical and lumbar regions, AP views resulted in significantly greater radiation exposure than corresponding lateral images."

via https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18679095 . Remotely regular exposure to high levels of radiation is bad, and not good.
You have an open door that will set you up for life. And for a lot less effort than basically anything else you can do. Use this opportunity as a springboard to get to your dreams. In 5-10 years once you have a family, you'll probably appreciate the stability FamBiz offers.

Now, I'm not saying throw away your dream for money. You'll resent the golden handcuffs if you do. I'm saying that you should figure out how to make them work in tandem. Granted you may never work at Google if you become CEO of FamBiz, but there is no reason you can't get your PhD then run FamBiz while pursuing your interests on the side. Think of it like being Elon Musk at a smaller scale. He has (and still does) run enormously profitable businesses and still spends time and money on things he is interested in.

tl;dr - you are being offered a stable and lucrative foundation from which to live your life. I'd say go for it and use it to fund your dreams.
> Im glad she was fired. Individuals like her should be fired

You can't comment like this here regardless of how strongly you feel or how wrong you think someone else is. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14704439.

Edit: since you've done this repeatedly and we warned you before, I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
One problem with this idea is that the land usable for agriculture also has to compete with other uses: residential housing, etc. You can't build housing in places where you can't grow food, because people don't really want to live in those places. So any place that's unusable for agriculture is also generally useless for most other human activities (it's either too hot or too cold, or is a wetland).

We already have enough environmental problems because humans have taken over too many wild spaces. There is not a large supply of usable land left; we've already used it. Point to a place that's currently unused, and I'll show you why no one wants to live there.
how much labor does capital need to produce returns?

the wages in economy are well documented. as well as returns on capital. Actual data matters. Don't take my word for it. read up an actual economist.

http://voxeu.org/article/reducing-inequality-deconcentrating...

The rich aren't rich because they put in more labor and got more salaries.
Unless you're building better humans, we're going to have the exact same political problems on Mars that we do on Earth. Except in an environment where any small thing going wrong has the potential to kill everyone.
The Court Jester in the Palace of Science (2000)
An article about someone found to have produced a false accusation is unlikely to provoke enlightening debate.
True but can the UK be truly considered part of Europe when we are talking about the US?
Negative yielding bonds have already happened. But for most of us (as individuals), the debts we owe aren't in the form of bonds. How about negative yielding mortgages? Credit cards?

Theoretically, they could happen. In practice, they probably won't, at least for a while after the start of the deflation.
The shortening of properties is very much a bad idea and should be avoided. "What the hell is `mb`?" is going to come up a lot.
Military jet fly-overs cost basically nothing at the margin. Pilots need X hours of air-time a month to stay trained, so it costs very little to do it over public events. It's money that will be spent either way.
> She said what was wrong, but did not say what was right. Explicitly.

She explicitly stated both that including “transgender” as a gender identity option was wrong, and that the right way was to ask about transgender status as a seperate question.
Out of curiosity, why did you feel the preface necessary? Your point seems to stand without it just fine.
I think this is part of it. I also think that humans are essentially greedy when it comes to progress. I am fortunate to have a nearly limitless supply of clean water, at nearly any temperature I want. Yet I still curse the shower for taking a minute or so to warm up. It just is never good enough, moving the goalposts as you say.
The way to search history seems cool.
Good to see I wasn't the only one to look at the table of atomic radius to check this.
A hackernews ncurses CLI written in Go
You shifted the argument (which nobody was making) to being "modern is better" using your car example. I'm bringing it back to user-serviceable is _better_.

>Which is done because solder is thinner/lighter than sockets, and therefore you can get a thinner/lighter laptop.

So let them figure out another way to make it thinner/lighter. I don't want them to do it at the expense of upgrading common parts. We're not asking for every single chip to be replaceable. Just the obvious parts that have an established 10+ year history of being serviceable. I bet welding every single part on a car makes it lighter too, but I don't think people want to replace the entire car if their fuel pump breaks.

>There are real engineering tradeoffs all over the place here that are being elided

Huh? You switched from purely cosmetic factors - thinner/lighter, to engineering. You will have to explain that one to me...
There was an article recently where some higher ups talked about the engineering. They described focusing work on the factory itself instead of the product with the idea being that every time you improve or fix the factory, you gain many upsides in the final output.

Can't find the article but I was an interesting read
Yes, we don't want long lifetimes on products that have externalities.
I don't mean to imply that the actions of the Trump administration are healthy or appropriate. But having just read "Dereliction of Duty" [1] about the Kennedy and Johnson administration and how the Vietnam War was managed in its early days, I think it's clear that the kind of behavior here, especially around valuing personal loyalty over competence or being given accurate information is not a new phenomenon.

The fallout of Watergate, especially the fact that the executive no longer routinely records conversations, mean that we'll never have a good idea of normal/not-normal in this context ever again the way that we have it for the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. So I can't say whether subsequent presidents have made similar decisions, but the "personal loyalty" thing is very definitely not a new thing.

Note that this isolation from reality had large-scale disastrous consequences at that time, so this is not to say that we should become complacent about it. But in itself, I'm finding the "not normal" critique to be a bit shallow; a sort of tu quoque that substitutes for actually criticizing the concrete actions of the administration.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004HW7834 -- written by H. R. McMaster, our current National Security Adviser, who I sincerely hope will hold to the standards that he advocates in that volume.
2.5 years ago, we tried pretty much all the GraphDBs out there. We decided to go with OrientDB (it was 2.0.something), but after only 3 months of POC, we switched to Neo4j. Why? Because the documentation was poor and we found some issues, so we couldn't trust OrientDB to be our primary DBMS.

With Neo4j everything was great at the beginning where we had 1 server only, but when we switched to the Enterprise Edition for HA (special price for startup, otherwise it would be unaffordable. Without the startup price it would be around $100K per year for 3 servers, crazy!), it didn't scale for our use case (primarily because of its master-slave architecture and other bugs and limitations here and there).

Our use case is 50% read and 50% writes, we have seen that Neo4j is mostly used as an Analytical database, so maybe with 100% reads it could be ok.

So on January 2017, we evaluated the new DataStax DSE, but it was really unstable (we think it's still an alpha version, but for marketing reasons, they pushed it as a stable GA). So we decided to give to OrientDB another chance. We've wasted $20 on buying the only available book for OrientDB, but it treats OrientDB as a Document database. After reading the OrientDB manual, we converted our Cypher queries to the new OrientDB SQL MATCH (that is very similar) and in less than 2 weeks our application was up & running with OrientDB and 5 servers.

We found 3 minor issues the team resolved in a few days, we have another issue that is still not fixed, but so far so good, we're happy in production with a 100% uptime in the last 4 months. I've seen OrientDB is much faster with multiple servers. We decided to not use sharding with OrientDB for now because it doesn't look mature enough, but maybe we will try it in 1y.

So my final advice is: Neo4j is very expensive, but it works very well for read-only use cases. You can find a lot of tutorials, examples, books around it. If you're a GraphDB rookie you should start with Neo4j, but pay attention to the license or you'll end up paying Neo4j more than Oracle.

OrientDB cost much less than Neo4j (the Community Edition is free for any purpose, but it doesn't have the non-stop incremental backup that we needed, so we purchased the Enterprise). It's much faster in our use cases, but they have less marketing people = less popular than Neo4j.

Only with 2.2.x, OrientDB reached a good level of stability and is perfect for both read and read/write use cases. DataStax DSE will be a good product, maybe, in 1-2 years, but for now, it's like a toy.