skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sometime back, I worked with a colleague who was completely blind. As I was introduced to this new would-be-teammate, I instinctively tried to thrust my hand forward for a handshake, only to stop myself short with a horrifying realization that might not be an appropriate form. Fortunately, to my great relief, he was used to such situations and offered his hand first. This moment particularly struck me.

The experience of working with him was exciting and as challenging as it was enlightening, as I think I learnt a bit more about myself and all the things around me I took for granted.

Anyway, here are some of my observations

1. Navigating a busy open-layout office is possible, but hard. My colleague was really great at doing so without using his stick.

2. Often it is the sighted who would hesitate at water-cooler chat for fear of offending or saying something untoward, but the colleague took the initiative to put them at ease, so it was always fun. No one could slip out unnoticed by him. The puns were mortifyingly entertaining, which I think only a blind person can make.

3. The written form of communication goes great lengths in bridging the communication gap (This is applicable in general as well)

4. ASCII diagrams and SVGs are great ways of making content such as flow charts and architecture diagrams accessible. Tools such as PlantUML, dotviz, mermaidjs are helpful.

5. Statically typed languages make it much easier to work within a screen-reader environment. We were working with Go, and he had much better success with it than a language that was used in other parts of the company.

6. Emacs seems to have a lot of tooling to facilitate the use of screen-readers.

7. Open-office chatter (in-person and chat) can become overwhelming very quickly, so setting expectations ahead on how you'd plan to work helps your teammates.

8. Monitoring is hard (in a server-side environment) as the notion of "taking a look" at the graphs doesn't translate for someone who is not sighted. I wish there were better ways that are more accessible.

Losing sight is perhaps one of the most terrifying prospects anyone can face. However, seeing (see what I did there) my colleague also gives me hope that all is not futile. It is possible to live a fulfilled life. It is possible to have a successful career as a software developer. Being blind does not have to mean disabled but merely differently-abled.

I wish you the best of luck.
#1 is a poor lifestyle choice.

#3 is poor self control and spinelessness in negotiating working schedule.
Maybe have them start with an MSP, as they demonstrate ability, rigor, decision making, etc., they may be able to pull back on hours and get to service a few choice clients, as they get known they may be able to go on a 1099, if that’s what they’re after.
My experience is what you do after you get up in the morning have great impact all day long. I use appdetox on phone and webblock on chrome to block easier news/SNS apps for the day and only allow them or gaming for a fixed time at night as reward(after a while I find solving hard problems more rewarding than yhose shallow entertainment). I find it became easier to focus on hard things after starting doing this. If you do easy things at morning, the whole day is ruined. Also I run or swim at 5pm.
Who ends up paying for them and why?
I try with such questions and people still grip to their 100% nonsense claims even when you show them that they dont know what are they talking about and is not even logical for various reasons. But, I still mostly do it for other people who read or watch that and have still not fallen for dumb conspiresies so that they would hear a reasonable contraargument. We need more logic, reason and critical thinking in this world.
Otherwise known by its NSFW name, the 'clitmouse'.
There is the potential that you have ADHD, because what you're describing sounds similar to my situation. I eventually ended up on stimulant medication to help, but there's non-stimulant medication available (if you're opposed to eating amphetamines for breakfast), as well as counselling and other treatment options that don't involve medication.

Even if you don't want to seek professional treatment, you could look up articles on solving problems and achieving goals written specifically for people with ADHD and see if those help.
It s relative. You can work 40 hrs for a 24hr job, or 60 hrs for a 40hr job. The former is still part time.
Amazon pharmacy OS powering PillPack
• I don't want to admin a server.

• I don't understand what does it mean “to own a domain name”, what kind of ID is it tied to.

• I'd have to write a spam-resilient js-free https-free comments system. It'd take time, it'd have to be based on PGP, and in the end nobody would use it.

So I just worship my Fediverse Instance Admin Deity instead, for now.
Agreed, I think straight deletion is pretty irresponsible, but it was possible to see this kind of thing on the horizon since the sale to Atlassian. It's good to know how seriously they take the custodianship of potentially extremely important resources.
It’s the US spec. EU side it’s chip and pin. Which arguable is much of a sameness since you’re touching the key pad
Creatives use this technique (Pomodoro) to overcome procrastination and stay effective to achieve their goals.

I have a video discussing using this technique with Agile Scrum. As a developer, we can borrow ideas from other disciplines! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCPTc79oVg8
No, I haven't overlooked that, it's just not really relevant. You'd still be paid if the norm for a salaried position were a 16-hour workday, it wouldn't make it any less exploitative.

In that scenario, you couldn't "choose" to go work for 8 hours instead and take a loss in pay - no firm is hiring "full-time" at 8 hours - which actually rounds right back to the issue brought up by this thread: you'd be looking for part-time work that doesn't exist.
I thought they were more for semi-privacy. They block the main line of sight of passers-by, but allow light, air, and sound to easily flow -- and entering/exiting is simple.

Some people still use these in house bathrooms by the toilet area -- especially if the bathroom is shared with others. Same thing with public restrooms.
rtaudio (https://www.music.mcgill.ca/~gary/rtaudio/index.html) works pretty well in linux. I built a small shim with it for a pi zero that allows me to embed a vcv module on the pi which acts as a USB Audio device (in gadget mode). makes for an interesting eurorack environment.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=blind+software+...
Thanks! I enjoyed the challenge of keeping this lean. It's fun to build a web app where the favicon is the bulk of the bytes on the wire. :)
I suggest practice with voice readers without looking e.g. start with web browsing and NVDA. When you get confused, try to resolve without looking. If that fails, use your sight to work out why you went wrong: especially learn what heuristic you could have used to correct yourself without needing sight? You would need someone else to help if you try to learn after your sight went - I found that the accessibility software had a lot of showstopper usability bugs.

If your balance issues are manageable, perhaps start joining blind social or support groups in your area. Potentially you could help them with their technical issues, since maybe you would learn a lot by helping others, and there are always people that really need help with tech!

And a supremely left-field idea: Perhaps investigate changing states or countries if you find that your local systems are not helping you? Some places have better infrastructure for the blind or sight impaired - do you see pedestrian markings locally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactile_paving or are they dangerous: https://99percentinvisible.org/article/death-tactile-paving-... also it is rumoured that some wealthy countries with socialised health may help you more?

Good luck. PS: I’m not sight impaired.
Here (Germany) it was recently announced that banks would raise the limit up to which no validation is needed for (maybe just contactless?) payments. And indeed since then I haven't had to confirm a transaction, which is why I asked.
Japan had been under-testing and under-reporting to save their face -- or the Olympics. As recent as last week, their health official confessed they had a testing capacity for only 200 per day in Tokyo. Japan's case number and death started skyrocketing since the Olympics postponement on March 24 and nobody thinks it's just a coincidence.

Also note Japan has a large elderly population, or about 32+K, who die unnoticed in solitude every year.
The employer requirement for health insurance is only for full-time employees. That scales down great. Two half-time employees should be much cheaper than one full-time.
http://www.alteraeon.com/ may be of interest.

Alter Aeon is a text-based online roleplaying game (a MUD). I believe that over half of their players are vision-impaired. Perhaps they could be a source of information as well as community.
1. The news sites make the snippets available

2. Google could just stop showing them. See Spain where this killed the newspapers.

This is entirely a case of publishers wanting their cake and Google's too.
What was needed for the West was to just get serious about the disease and Lockdown. As early as January or February. A country as populous as India (with 1.3 billion people) has been under lockdown for well over 27 days and counting. Will be under lockdown till May the 3rd (and might get extended too if the curve has not flattened). We went in early unlike Italy or the United States. And it was a complete shutdown and not partial.

Even before the Lockdown commenced, we were testing all travelers as early as January and isolating those who were showing any signs of sickness. The Western countries did not do any of it. These two things alone helped slowdown the spread of the virus. There was no need for large amounts of ventilators, masks or PPE. Just common sense.

What the West got wrong was not "lack of ability" to build things. It was "lack of agility" to respond to the emerging crisis. The West should have gone in for a complete lockdown. The West should have tested (no contact thermal testing would have been sufficient) all travelers at the entry point. This slackness cost so many lives!

I remember having a discussion [1] about this almost a month ago when the first major destructive potential of this pandemic was still unravelling in the West. Many were skeptical about how India would respond and that it was a disaster waiting to happen. But no such disaster happened because of how proactive the Government of India had been since January. This proactiveness has allowed India to have really low number of positive cases compared to the West. This also doesn't put pressure on the medical system.

The lesson to learn here is that you should use common sense. A lot of it. First control the spread of the virus and then work on a cure. You can't let the virus wreak havoc and then expect a vaccine or a cure be available immediately to tackle it. It puts unnecessary pressure on scientists who need crucial time to figure out a cure. But I guess it is too late now and the West will just have to ride the wave. Unfortunately a lot of lives will be lost in the process. Very sad.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22609604
Well, their CFR is currently around 2%. I tend to think this will be roughly the best that can be achieved considering their investment in both T&T as well as an excellent healthcare system.

If you are effective at preventing the spread, then you can get lucky in terms of protecting the more vulnerable. I'd love to see some demographic breakdowns of deaths/infections in SK to see if they mirror the general population, or skew a different direction.
I have no real advice. But I want to wish you good luck. And let you know that at my modest level, I will always advocate for good accessibility in software and hardware.
You could clone highly specialized devices, but it's not clear who you're going to sell them to. I'd like to think that most of my small, specialized customer base would turn up their noses at an obvious clone of my own product.

The people who need to worry about this are the Ciscos and Keysights and John Deeres and other 800-pound gorillas whose products have a broad user base that includes cost-sensitive customers.
> The people who messed up were the field agents.

I'm basing this on your TL;DR, but not only did he know (no way to get rid of the fakes?), it also sounds a little bit like he gave them some winks along the lines of "whatever if they're not real, just bring me claimants".
Run a company.

Rather hire 3 full time devs than 6 half time devs.

Lots of work to train and keep people updated.

Life’s too short to increase my complexity for people to have a more relaxed life.
PCR tests are asymmetric. Positive result almost certainly means that this person has the virus, but negative result might mean a number of things. Bad swab (less than 3000 virus copies), temporary remission (Korea has at least 160 such cases by now), etc.

Test kit availability adds another layer. At some point New York had 200 confirmed cases, and two weeks later 400 deaths, yet CFR is unlikely to be as high as 200%.

So yes, all statistics should be taken with a grain of salt, but magnitude and direction of that grain may be different.
> piracy website DNS entries removed

I admit I hardly visit pirate sites, but I didn't even notice that happen. I just checked and the Pirate Bay is still available so I don't know what they're even blocking.
You're both correct
Linux++ (April 19, 2020)
Do the things you need to do.

Don’t let your brain try to trick you out of it.
> discovering I'd be going blind in the parking lot post appointment

That is devastating.

Did you get a second opinion?
cmix uses a LTSM net: http://www.byronknoll.com/cmix.html
Lots of good possibilities here. My own experience has been that when I'm more physically fit (eating, sleeping, etc), I'm better mentally fit. And when I'm more mentally fit, I'm more spiritually fit (for whatever definition of "spirituality" you want). When I feel one is lagging, I usually find part of the problem in the layer below. And that fixing that causes the next layer up to flourish better. Irrationally, emotional fitness seems to weave in and out of those three in irrational ways. :)
For those looking to go beyond Pete’s “in a weekend” book, the full text of the 3rd edition of PBRT is freely available online:

http://www.pbr-book.org/3ed-2018/contents.html
Those sound like exactly the same issues as working from home, all-remote teams, flex hours, etc., all of which are becoming fairly popular with employers. If companies are OK with having half my team on a different continent, they should be able to deal with me being offline in the afternoons.
Govt to release source code of forthcoming 'Covid trace' app
exercise!
Hi, this sounds really usefl and wanted to give it a try, but the connection hanged while trying to connect. I was able to scan the URL in my phone and open the browser (Firefox Nightly), but couldn't see it in action. My phone was stuck in "Peer Created", while desktop (Firefox Developer Edition) was at "Reconnecting!". Is it a network problem on my side?
They and others discussed the issue enough to make your original statement false, including questions like "Why isn't testing ramping up?". That's the point I wanted to make. I'm not really looking to find timestamps and links for you when you haven't even done a cursory search before stating that no one was talking about testing.
fwiw there's a popular symbolic execution tool with the same name https://github.com/trailofbits/manticore

Just got confused for a sec.
I find myself going quieter when I read faster. I do take pauses to think through what I’ve just read.
You may want to try separating reading and thinking, and see if that helps you no longer need to think aloud reach word.
Failure detection, mitigation and ‘Gray Failures’
How do you define the differentiation between programmers and engineers?
You might like https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/03/why-decentralization...
This is an ad. Don't do that. Submit a "Show HN" instead.

(But I'm still taking a look. The premise is wonderful, including that there is a Firefox version, which should be obvious but apparently isn't to many. )
When you're long timing doesn't matter as much, but when you are short it does. The Economist in 2005 had a cover story warning of a crash triggered by real estate. But if you shorted then you probably would have lost a lot of money.

As they say, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
Show HN: ConsoleInteractive – Simple .NET library to parse input from console
That's not an issue with the source code linked above which is just basic javascript.
I have been thinking about this problem for a long time, and I think it's cultural. I don't limit it to American or Western culture; I think this a human behavior.

My thesis is that quantitative and spatial intelligences, which are required to build things, are rarer than verbal intelligence and thus more likely to regress to the mean. This makes them harder to pass on to progeny and less reliable as conduits of status.

Highly verbal careers like law and to a lesser extent finance (which is more about networking than crunching numbers at the high level) are more accessible to the average heir, because they require more common skills. If being an engineer or doctor were the pinnacle of social status, it would be harder to pass on social status because it would be less likely that your child would be able to perform those functions.

So elites decided to build societies that gave structural advantages to the so-called FIRE economy because that gave them the best chance at locking in their status. This relegated builder careers to second or third tier status.
Thank you! I have a pile of masks I’m looking to donate and was wondering where to bring them. This is fantastic
Learn the Truth About Getting a Computer Science Degree in the Next 5 Minutes
Well said. Used to be a die hard Smalltalker (with a strong appreciation for my Lisp (esp CLOS) cousins). Now I get by doing Swift, Kotlin, Python, and a bit of embedded C. Life feels dirtier now.
In my experience part employees have more “context switching” to deal with obviously, so it really is case by case whether or not someone’s more efficient as a part timer
FYI that process is called "subvocalization" - I'm only passingly familiar, but if you search that term there's lots of literature about it.
Some things that have been extremely useful for me:

Play video games that require intense focus for prolonged durations to perform well like Starcraft 2, CSGO, DOTA 2 helped me build mental endurance.

Reduce social media. I’ve found that this was the most productive. Social media was fragmenting my attention by making me anxious and addicted. After I reduced Reddit and Facebook usage, my mental discipline increased drastically.

Keep a journal. I’ve found verbalizing my thoughts in a simple and concise manner is hard and requires a lot of focused thinking.

Aerobic exercise helps; more circulation for your brain means it can work better

I’ve been dealing with the same problem too so I’ve been finding ways to engage myself.
Sure, but there are a few caveats to that:

+ Firefox doesn't use the system DNS by default anymore (Defaults to the DoH provider, usually Cloudflare)

+ Chrome doesn't use the system DNS by default anymore (Defaults to Google's)

+ Businesses often set the default DNS to use Google's, not their ISPs.
Crimson Contagion
I don't see why it is suspicious. It may have been redacted but there's nothing intrinsically wrong AFAICT.

Howard Markel, M.D., Ph.D. of the University of Michigan Center for the History of Medicine talks about the 2nd hump:

https://www.mdlinx.com/physiciansense/covid-19-is-a-second-p...
Tabula PDF: Extract table data from PDFs
Yes, the original function converges (not its derivative). The terms in the derivative are no longer divided by a^k. The a^k from the argument to cos/sin cancels then out (it becomes a multiplier, because of the chain rule).

So the series for the derivative is 0 + 1 + 0 + 1 + ..., which doesn’t converge.

Not sure what this has to do with fractal dimensions. This is a simple question of definitions. The word “smooth”, in math, literally implies, by definition, that the function is everywhere approximable by lines.

If you don’t think it does, can you state the formal definition of “smooth” that you’re using?

The Weierstrass function doesn’t have discontinuities, btw.
It wasn't intentionally, and it happened two decades ago.

I'm pretty sure, for example, that the Times gets criticised for this at least ten times as often as the Republican Party does, even though the latter was not only the origin of the lie the NYT fell for, but the actual group of people making the decision to go to war.

Only Google shutting down Reader has a worse <magnitude of mistake>/<longevity of criticism> ratio.
Are you international?
If so, not surprised. You need to be einstein to get into anywhere interesting with international status
FYI the Reddit link under the Android FAQ item is broken
HackRack: Build racks, make viruses and hack networks
Five Bullet Sunday – best articles, videos and product news from the week
These attempts to claim that crowded subways have nothing to do with the spread in NYC are bizarre. If there's no problem spending upwards of an hour with many other people in a small enclosed space, then the entire concept of social distancing is useless.
Fellow ADHD sufferer here to second this. Thinking about ADHD as a deficit of motivation, which is much more accurate than an attention-oriented view, tends to clarify this sort of situation.
My “laziness” was caused by little t trauma from childhood. I would stare at my editor and just start to cry at how I couldn’t bring myself to write code. I’m still working through it, but what has helped for me is taking space away from work, therapy, and the book The Road Less Traveled by Scott Peck. Good luck.
On my blog I frankly don’t want/expect comments. It’s intentionally a solitary space for just me. But here it’s like being at an interesting party.

OTOH a blog is more SEO friendly, and a better signpost to leave for others on the broader Internet whereas these comments are temporal.

The blog is suited for longer form content with visuals, headers, and structure. The hacker news comment is suited for short and sweet insights
Building up a financial foundation as an employee can take years. The OP may not have that much time.
I therefore suggested algo trading ( their programming skills come to use ), and creating and selling off products ( where they build things and sell them off, instead of building a SaaS business and getting caught up in all the business building).
why it ask me admin password?
In my experience, context switching is more a problem in the short-term, where you're working on two problems at once and switching between them constantly. Or, when you're working on one thing and you're interrupted by a question from someone else in the office.

Also, here's one source that suggests increased productivity with a 4-day workweek (Microsoft Japan): https://www.npr.org/2019/11/04/776163853/microsoft-japan-say...

More here: https://30hourjobs.com/4-day-work-week/
“Of course I said yes... I want to help. This is a collective crisis. The government is doing what it can. Everyone needs to do their bit.”

I live in the wrong country. Can I come live with you Germany?
I'm arguing that education institutions in the US should be tasked primarily with education, not babysitting, or "taking care" of kids. For a country that spends as much as we do on K-12 education, we get sub-optimal results, largely because some people view educators as glorified babysitters. Perhaps the value of educators will change as more parents deal with "taking care of their kids" during the various state shutdowns.