skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I work in accessibility and see lots of posts like this one — cautioning the reader from every doing X because it creates accessibility problems for me.

It may be possible to follow most/all such advice when building an app or website, but surely it is not possible for presentations (which have to be consumed in the same format by everyone present). Some may hate dark text on a light background; others may find that the only suitable format.[1] So when I read posts like these, I don't view them as imperatives ("never do X") but rather as data points to be factored into decision-making processes.

This is easiest when the post explains the problem and gives various alternatives and explains why they provide a better experience. When they just leave it at "never do X", I'm left wondering whether Y is better than Z or vice-versa. I wish the author had given more context about why this is bad for astigmatism, or what sorts of things are better than others (in terms of ranking alternatives).

1: I hear from people who say that the only decent color scheme for BeeLine Reader (my text accessibility startup) is bright red and bright blue. But other people tell me that color scheme is terrible and shouldn't be the default on my website because it is so bad. You literally cannot please all of the people all of the time! [edited]
The reason that the uk want to set up a research funding body is that after brexit the EU will not be funding research projects in the uk.

There are a few things to note here:

1. Because the funding body doesn’t exist, it can be described fit whatever characteristics the government chooses, whether or not they could actually create such a body.

2. Because of the current state of the government, this should really be looked at more like an election promise than an actual proposal. In particular the government can’t really pass any legislation at the moment and will likely go into an election soon.

3. On the other hand it seems like a weird election promise. I think most voters don’t particularly care about science funding and surely almost all of them won’t know about DARPA or ARPA. So maybe it’s trying to persuade scientists to stay in the uk. Or maybe it’s a new minister trying to make his mark. Or maybe it really is just the plan for how the government want to do research. Or maybe it’s targeted at academics who hate the bureaucracy of grant applications.

——— ——— ———

My understanding of the current research funding organisations is that they require a huge amount of work to be done by academics on grant proposals and on further bureaucracy during the research. (In particular there are more proposals than there is money so one must write the best proposal one can to place highly. Also because of the limited funds in the budget, the funding body wants enough paperwork to get its money’s worth). My understanding of typical military funding in the US is that they give good money but they require frequent evidence of actual results. They also mainly want to find things with reasonable applications to the military. My understanding of (D)ARPA is that they threw money at various projects with reasonably to very broad research proposals, often in basic science, hoping something good would come out of it.

I’m not sure how well a DARPA model would work across all research in the uk. There are lots of fields and they are different in what and how they research. It feels like lots of people could lose out on basically any funding. And so we would lose out on their research.

On the other hand the incentives for researchers (to spend all their time on grant applications) aren’t great. One weird suggestion I see from time to time is to put all grant proposals into either a good enough or not good enough bucket, and then somehow randomly allocate grants between the good proposals.
Pretty sure KSP RAPIER is a fictional copy of the described SABRE engine.
Send all open issues and PRs on GitHub to a table in Airtable
Browsers already follow developer whims, see: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Fe...

YouTubeTV uses feature policy to disable the browser's picture-in-picture feature.
Cylindrical correction in contact lenses tends to be both more expensive and not as good as glasses, so contact lens wearers with astigmatism may have this issue.
I took a peak at the OP's post history (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20945426), it seems this is their chatbot (for FB): https://mapletechno.com/landing.php

Unless you have moved the chatbot to a different website since then, based on the product as is, it would be better to focus on a) translating the website into English and b) finding some beta testers and users.

I guess most of the replies here are based on your use of the word coporation, hence they're sharing advice about lanfing multi-figure deals but realistically, the target market for FB chatbots are small to medium business owners.
The way I have thought about software's necessary complexity for a long time is by considering what software IS. Software, no matter what it does or how it is written, boils down to instructions and data that operate on transistor gates in a computers processor and memory. We must write code which orchestrates the flipping of millions or billions of switches, millions or billions of times a second, in exact perfect synchronicity. The machines these run on, if transistors are considered a 'part' are the most complex machines in terms of part count ever created by humanity, packing up to around a billion parts into about a square inch of space. Also, our software isn't the only thing running. It must coexist with an unknowable number of other pieces of software flipping the gates in unknowable ways. Also, we do not interact with the gates directly. We do so at a level which is many layers of abstraction removed from them, like building a car the size of North America from the moon with chopsticks long enough to reach. Oh, and if we, at that level of gates, get one thing out of sync or make a single mistake, it can effectively instantly cascade into taking the entire system down.

So, yes, software is complex. And it will always remain complex. It is doing monstrously complex things under the hood, all abstractions are leaky, and we are definitely past the point at which one person can even reasonably understand the entire stack from transistors all the way up through OS, compiler, language, etc. We must accept this fact of complexity and formulate ways to deal with it, to contain it and reduce it when we can, but it will always be with us.
WhatsApp in the Arab world: an essential but controversial tool
I Deal with Poor Performers
Wow I actually used songbird too. Totally forgot that existed!
If the problem is that severe, get over your vanity and get a good pair of specs
Well it says "Over $5000.00 in Police Equipment being marketed to Law Enforcement only." I read that as that there's optional gear that is a restricted buy, not the car itself. You could be right though. Also, no matter who buys it they'll have to remove the decals before driving since it's not going to be bought by the same agency that sold it.

A good question though is how much do you have to change before you can legally drive it?

This guy here seems to believe that driving a police car with lights and even "911" and "Dodge Law Enforcement" is Ok as long as it doesn't say the word "Police" at which point it would be impersonating a police officer.

https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1100773_driving-a-police...

In this police forum where they are discussing the issue one person notes that in California driving anything that remotely looks like a police car is illegal, and another states that in Tennessee you can drive a police car if you feel like it. So state laws perhaps vary as to whether you have to remove the decals and/or repaint the whole thing before driving a decalled surplus acquisition.

https://forum.officer.com/forum/public-forums/general-law-en...
Perhaps building an app that synchronizes conference slides to a phone and allows users to customize the contrast/appearance of the slides would help in this case?
World will get hotter, ice will melt. Sea water conversion to drinking water will become major project.

Air conditioner/purifier business will grow.

Artificial foods will give rise to new diseases. Cancers will rise.

Cars will be detachables.

More loners than ever.

Real estates will boom in VR.
Just listened to it[1] twice; Thanks for the recommendation!

[1] - https://castro.fm/episode/bwHpe7
I really don't get it... I have severe astygmatism (which caused amblyopia in infancy) among other visual defects. My glasses do the best they can but my corrected vision still has a lot of visual defects. My poor vision causes me trouble with a lot of day-to-day things, but white text on black background is not one of them. I experimented without my glasses and I still don't have a preference for black-on-white over white-on-black - they are equal.

Not really a fan of the ranty style without a solution.

On top of that, like another commentor mentioned, people with astygmatism typically wear glasses or contacts?
I would like a word that means 'exhibits self-similar structure at different scales '. This is a useful definition because people outside of math can notice this pattern in our world.

If not fractal, then what word?
As a related question to this: we're successfully selling into corps but it takes 6-12 months. Has anyone figured out the under $500 credit card thing with seat pricing or know good examples of it (where the ACVs are still high)?

We'd like to land-and-expand since our product has to be used by teams but I'd love to get the sales cycle shorter.
That is a stupendously dangerous question to ask, and that the answer is not crystal clear from the outset is terrifying. When humanity and computers collide, the computer is always in the wrong. Every single time, forever. At no point is it acceptable to ask that any human being alter their culture, lifestyle, or thinking because it fits the boxes the developers were asked to put in place. Doing so would make stupid bureaucractic policy mistakes into cultural catastrophes. I legitimately fear two agents of oppression: 'Sorry, it's policy' used to excuse cruelty, and 'the software doesn't have a place for me to put that.'
The demiurge.
> Ireland gave Scotland bagpipes and the Scots didn’t get the joke.

They even spread it across the empire.

https://youtu.be/vkYbSwb0s4E
Everything you hear from the government, ever since Boris Johnson was selected as the PM, is geared towards elections. Winning an early election was his entire plan from day 1.

In that context, this looks like a low cost effort to potentially influence a small minority that may be influenced. Y science funding. But more importantly to provide a talking point to negate at least 1 argument against leaving the EU, whether in reality it does so or not.
Just about every site out there is on cloudflare these days and cloudflare has decided to consider every connection from a total exit point as suspicious activity. Hence you get a captcha for almost every site you visit. Eternally stuck in captcha hell...
The main difference between the USA's "first inventor to file" and the "first to file" systems in most of the rest of the world is how disclosing the invention publicly by printed publication, use, or sale before you apply for a patent affects patent eligibility.

In the "first to file" systems, you lose eligibility. In the "first inventor to file" system of the US, you have a grace period of one year from such disclosure before you lose eligibility, just like you did under the prior "first to invent" system.

To a decent first approximation, the change to the US system mostly just affects how things are handled if independent inventors try to patent the same thing.

Under the "first to invent" system, the patent went to whichever applicant invented the thing first. But when is something invented? When you first think of the idea? Or when you have reduced the idea to practice? Or sometime in between?

Under the US first to invent system, it was when you conceived the invention if you then worked diligently from that point to reduction to practice. If you stop so working and resume, your lose the prior invention date and your new invention date is when you resumed working diligently on reduction to practice.

When two or more inventors were claiming the same invention determining who was actually first under those rules could be difficult and messy, requiring hearings, and costing the inventors money for attorneys. Now with first inventor to file, we pretty much don't care who thought of it first--we just care which person who independently thought of it reduced it to practice and submitted their patent application first. That's a lot simpler, and requires no expensive hearings.
I have made something similar trying to match more the concept of a materialized view, but just on the client instead of inside the database: https://github.com/tozd/node-reactive-postgres
and if you dont have any of these things dont pursue the idea!

if this is your only and big idea that you have to get married to so you can “ strike it big” then you are already playing at a disadvantage

The rest of us, your competition, have an idea every other week and just revisit them when they are economical

its not “strike while the iron is hot” its have 100 irons to begin with
White text on black is my second favorite. Only thing better is green text on black.

The reason is very simple: There's less light coming from the screen into my eye.

Every monitor I've ever owned I reduce the brightness to the lowest setting possible, and they are still too bright.

Green is best because the high resolution parts of your eye only see green. So the blue and red components of white are just unnecessary extra light.
Maybe this is victim-blaming, but my suggestion to the post’s author is to update her prescription. I have astigmatism. This solution worked for me.
They would not be an inventor, and would not be eligible for a patent in the US or in most other jurisdictions.
AWSume: AWS Assume Role Made
Thank you! That's a super clear explanation and explains what's going on.
Ethereum Announces to Perform Istanbul Hardfork in December
Yes, and if we stay awake playing video game tournaments and staring at a computer screen, that's usually the point of complete exhaustion.
> Edison did not actually invent the light bulb, of course.

Of courser he did. He had the concept of a high voltage being applied across a high resistance filament, which turned out to be the key insight to making a lightbulb useful. Other experimenters were stuck on using low resistance, high current filaments, which just couldn't be made into a useful bulb.
I see the white on black ok for a few moments, but soon my eyes can't see anything (or rather, can't discern shapes and text and such).

The worst are websites with white text on black backgrounds. Arstechnica used to do this, and I was unable to read more than a paragraph or two. Then when I would leave and go back to normal sites, I would have all kinds of weird ghost blocks in my vision (character sized).
FLIF needs a catchier, pronounceable file extension name.
In general, studies measure the average effect.

Usually, there is a lot of variances, so even if on average something is worse, for some individuals it is better.
Q: What is this ‘Encryption Key’ thing?

When a secret chat is created, the participating devices exchange encryption keys using the so-called Diffie-Hellman key exchange. After the secure end-to-end connection has been established, we generate a picture that visualizes the encryption key for your chat. You can then compare this image with the one your friend has — if the two images are the same, you can be sure that the secret chat is secure, and no man-in-the-middle attack can succeed.

Newer versions of Telegram apps will show a larger picture along with a textual representation of the key (this is not the key itself, of course!) when both participants are using an updated app.

Always compare visualizations using a channel that is known to be secure — it's safest if you do this in person, in an offline meeting with the conversation partner.
Q: Why not just make all chats ‘secret’?

All Telegram messages are always securely encrypted. Messages in Secret Chats use client-client encryption, while Cloud Chats use client-server/server-client encryption and are stored encrypted in the Telegram Cloud (more here). This enables your cloud messages to be both secure and immediately accessible from any of your devices – even if you lose your device altogether.

The problem of restoring access to your chat history on a newly connected device (e.g. when you lose your phone) does not have an elegant solution in the end-to-end encryption paradigm. At the same time, reliable backups are an essential feature for any mass-market messenger. To solve this problem, some applications (like Whatsapp and Viber) allow decryptable backups that put their users' privacy at risk – even if they do not enable backups themselves. Other apps ignore the need for backups altogether and fade into oblivion before ever reaching a million users.

We opted for a third approach by offering two distinct types of chats. Telegram disables default system backups and provides all users with an integrated security-focused backup solution in the form of Cloud Chats. Meanwhile, the separate entity of Secret Chats gives you full control over the data you do not want to be stored.

This allows Telegram to be widely adopted in broad circles, not just by activists and dissidents, so that the simple fact of using Telegram does not mark users as targets for heightened surveillance in certain countries. We are convinced that the separation of conversations into Cloud and Secret chats represents the most secure solution currently possible for a massively popular messaging application.

https://telegram.org/faq#q-what-is-this-encryption-key-thing
Were you not tired because you didn't need sleep, or because your mind was being stimulated?

It's quite easy to not feel tired when you're stimulated, but it doesn't mean you don't need sleep.
I have astigmatism and I have no idea what the author's talking about. I stare at white on black terminal text all day without issue (maybe it's different for presentations?). I've also made presentations with white on black text before and had no problem reading the slides.
Gee, I wonder why.
28-Year-Old Couple Quit Their Jobs and Make $20K/Month Running a Blog
So what the EU does is just charge more for everyone which means women pay higher rates for car insurance despite having lower accident rates. So in the goal of equality, women are being forced to pay more than they should based on their level of risk. That’s exactly the opposite of discrimination — women pay more despite lower risk, which makes that EU law, discriminatory.
Whenever you have a chance to do something in a declarative way, it's the better way to go IMO. Sad to see XUL removed... newer Firefox extensions are integrated much more poorly and are slower when the browser is busy (due to JS). Probably not noticeable for one tab though.
Do you know what percentage of your traffic comes from the app's website? I have a tool that can double that number. Please get in touch if interested: http://contact.do/toni
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait like this and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21367020? You've been posting like that, in fact, for months. We ban accounts that post that way.

HN is not a place for ideological battle or religious flamewar. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site as intended, we'd be grateful. The idea is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
Tor browser won't make you a relay.

Indeed, Tor browser comes with its own dedicated tor instance. And I don't think that it can run as a relay. Maybe with some tweaking. Also, it's only running when the browser is.
> Ahem, the Irish had whiskey a thousand years before Americans

Not to be overly pedantic, but it was actually only around 700 years. Irish whiskey was first produced in the 12th century, and the first Kentucky whiskey is from the late 18th century.
I have significant astigmatism and I prefer light text on a dark background. When I used a Mac, I found the best solution to get everything dark enough was to use a light theme and used Mac’s Accessibility Menu to invert the screen colors. I spend 7-8 hours a day on a dark terminal with light letters.
Garbage in, garbage out. An algorithm trained on data from a bigoted society like ours will return bigoted results.

You can try to fix the algorithm but the only thing that can really work is to fix society...good luck with that.
Nuclear Power Debate
This is a real ketchsup on the hot dog situation
The Valley of the Cheese of the Dead
Juxtaposing Development Patterns: Crabtree Valley Mall and Downtown Raleigh, NC
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Mozilla/XUL...
Nah sometimes you need to resize manually read a webpage. Gotta keep usability at least a little bit. Letterboxing I think is a good compromise
They sure have! They smuggled in $3M of Iraqi artifacts [1]

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/05/01/607582135...
http://archive.is/Kvkzu
Okay, that’s fine. I think it would be nice for an OS to have a set of utilities that communicate with each other with objects instead of text. So I agree with you.

I’m just pointing out that this has literally zero whatsoever to do with the shell. You posted it as a comment in an article involving a choice of shells.

How am I being standoffish?
I understand all this, but is there any camera out there that supports this kind of setup out of the box? Or do I have to roll my own if I want to do this?
SourceForge Down from DDoS Event
even though they are different models, Iran captured a fully intact RQ-170 back in 2011

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–U.S._RQ-170_incident
Spooky Fizz Buzz
Oh boy, are you going to love this state-of-the-art new display technology: https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4142/4765726924_0c81d46a5b_b.j...

(Seriously, though, there may be an underlying physiological reason why the glow of a green phosphor CRT was so pleasing...)
Google is struggling with "transparency at scale" which is just business speak for "our employees won't just shut up and do their jobs".
Well you underestimate how complicated it is to run Google, and assumed Sundar isn't doing the best possible job.
One cannot cherry pick the economic growth in last 35-40 years of Chinese history, completely ignore the decades before that, and then proclaim the advantage of mono-culture.

The "unforced errors" were the death of 18-56 million Chinese in the Great Leap Forward https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward.

The Cultural Revolution [1] "Millions of people were persecuted or suffered public humiliation, imprisonment, torture, hard labor, seizure of property, and sometimes execution or harassment into suicide. Many urban intellectual youths were sent to the countryside in the Down to the Countryside Movement. Red Guards destroyed historical relics and artifacts or ransacked cultural and religious sites. " [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution

A single party system led by a dictator for life was the cause of the errors in the past and is the situation in the present. There is a problem with mono-culture.
I'm curious about your experience with HDR / other real-black displays. I have the same "problem", but find the new TVs with high contrast / darker blacks much nicer to look at. New MBP seems good too. I haven't tried a HDR monitor at home though - maybe you have some experience?
You believe strongly in this.

Why didn’t you use a larger font size to ensure everyone sees your message?
If you are wondering what this is, it's a fizz buzz where the code simply prints incrementing numbers and something is taking care of rendering fizz and buzz. I won't spoil the what is the something, but you should be able to figure it out.