skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That experience with acceessibility may be true for many websites, but certainly isn't the case for Microsoft products (and I assume websites but do not know for sure). I was on the Visual Studio Environment team, and we put an incredible amount of effort into making sure everything was accessibile. This meant not only screen readers, but also solid support for high-contrast or large font size OS modes (used by people who are not blind but have extremely limited vision). I spent many hours with my machine configured in super-low resolutions and large font+contrast mode or trying to use the product with only headphones and keyboard (monitor off).

I'm disappointed to hear that this person got such negative feedback from the companies they contacted. It probably sounds cheesy, but I fixed quite a few bugs related to accessibility and to this day I get a happy feeling remembering the feedback we got from the customers for whom this support was critical to their ability to earn a living as a software developer.
I'm not saying it's the right way to do things. I don't think that starving myself is GOOD. A hungry stomach just doesn't bother me anymore, so I have to proactively think about food. That may seem nonsensical to you if you are still deeply in touch with your sense of hunger, but take me at my word.

I didn't choose for it to be this way, I just didn't have much money for a while.
I beg to differ. You may tell that to yourself and feel better (and many Americans do), but in the grand scheme of actions-speak-louder-than-words world we live in, there is no evidence for the American respect for privacy.

> Does this mean "there is strong evidence that USA as a nation" doesn't value not dying?

No, but it does mean that the country does not value a social safety net as much as it values monetary profit for the few at the top of the healthcare insurance industry.

> "Don't seek government help, work harder, smile more and make more money" appears to be the answer/advice to those who complain/express outrage. Then you can buy yourself healthcare, privacy or anything you wish.

If you believe that, you are naive. Here are some facts for you (you can google them if you want, I don't have time)

* 75% of people who file for bankruptcy because of medical expenses (and there are a lot of them) HAVE health care insurance. That doesn't happen in any country with socialized health care.

* 40M americans are on food stamps; that is, they seek and receive government help, and unlike other government perks (like extended unemployment), these will never go away because that's what is stopping blood from flowing in the streets.

* Senators and Congressmen are, on the average, millionaires (unlike military people). They can afford the healthcare they want. And they want state sponsored health care, for life (as long as they've served two terms); what's not good for the goose is apparently excellent for the gander.

* The government takes money from you -- taxes -- essentially at gun point. You might believe it is only on income, but by debasing the currency (which the Fed has been doing very diligently since 2008, and slightly less diligently since 2000, and only just diligently since 1971), they rob the value of money you already have -- and if you hold only anything like gold that retains its value -- why, that's taxed as capital gains; you can't win.

* What the government does with this money is -- among other things -- give it to their friends on Wall Street. To the tune of trillions of dollars.

You know, I remember in 2004 I was arguing with an American friend about how americans can re-elect Bush, and his reply was "we're not stupid, it's just apathy". I see this apathy as stupidity.

And you know what? It's not that it can't be changed. It's just the everyone prefers cheap iPods to actually facing things that matters. In general, that only delays the arrival of the bill - but it is coming.
But a company that offers benefits already has an insurance contract with a broker and provider. That policy probably doesn't cover anyone outside the country; it may not even cover people in or out of certain states. So your remote benefits, while possibly cheaper, are a one-off, and a company may be reluctant to bother with such an unknown.
> good code written by some one else

Exactly -- someone else. I don't have a formal Computer Science education. I'm juggling reading the K+R C book, Knuth's Literate Programming, Odersky's Programming Scala and the Ruby "pickaxe" book. All of them have been great. But their impact on my code and career all pale in comparison to the strides I've made by paying attention to the social side of programming.

You should now:

* Talk to other programmers. I found a couple groups on Meetup.com that I like attending. Sometimes they're not specifically about programming (like my UX meetup). That's good. I am cross-training. I have asked some programmers whose work I admire for beer/coffee, on me, and I've had some great experiences. You will hear new ideas, and will have to defend your opinions.

* Find an open source project you like on Github.com and start contributing. Start with easy #bugs in "Issues". If you don't know which ones are easy, ask. You will get invaluable peer review, sometimes from the best minds in our field. You will read great code, and you will modify it, and so you will understand it deeply. You will have the satisfaction of knowing your code is used by hundreds or thousands of people.

* Find beauty in other things.
They did. Works via proxy for Germans :) eg. http://hidemyass.com/
Warning Zed! This is a humor free zone.
In some of the countries, not all of them (definitely not "for a long time"). But it is retained at the ISPs, with legally mandated security controls, except for government access. It would be better if they were not kept.

As far as I know, the only privacy of records the US law cares about is health care records, through the HIPAA act.
I've done accessibility work for large sites/corps and yes, it can cost to retrofit. Getting to the point of basic accessibility for most users is not that hard if you actually -think- about it during the design and development process!

Even the basic steps of using alt text, and seeing if your pages are readable with no CSS, and with different browser font sizes takes care of a huge number of issues that people encounter every single day. There are many more users affected than you think, and it's insanity to blatantly alienate customers.
I'm putting extra work into unit and UI testing to build a safety net so I can convince my CEO & other developers to let me carry out serious refactorings on our code, like deleting large chunks that aren't used anymore, and changing objects that are used pervasively.

We also have an increasingly broad application; as we add new features, I (as a developer) find that I don't visit older parts of the app, though of course the users still need them to work. Particularly when refactoring basic back end stuff that's called from lots of places, it's too tedious to manually track down every part of the UI that would need to be retested due to a given change (and then test it manually... ugh).
电视塔清洗
I just wanted to say thanks. :) As a person with low vision (and a heavy VS user), I'm grateful that there was so much attention to detail in the development of VS with respect to accessibility.

I don't know if it has to do with US government ADA requirements or not, but I'm glad that across the board Microsoft tends to build accessible software.
13% means 1 in 8 computers are made by Apple. How does that compare to HP, Dell, Lenovo, Asus, etc.?

It also means that for software and hardware developers, not supporting Mac means losing 13% of the total market. I imagine that to be higher (in creative markets) or lower (in enterprise markets) depending on the niche market.
Online forecasting
The bullshit extends beyond 10.7. The App Store replaces the Mac OS X Software download site so that my 10.5 system can no longer download software unless I pay Apple for an OS upgrade.
Yes, the book has received significant updates lately. More updates are available from the draft version: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/Draft/ . But, of course, it's not done yet, so there are still parts missing.
I think this book is better for learning programming than SICP. Background on the differences is available from the paper the HtDP authors wrote about the difference: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/racket/pubs/jfp2004-fffk.pdf
a `Hello World` HTTP Server + Express + Connect

that's basically Rails
Because I don't want to be tracked, I'd prefer bitcoin.

Don't Bitcoin's encode all transactions that they have been used for into the coin? Unless you use some intermediary to launder your payment bitcoin provides the ultimate in publicising your spending. And if you use an intermediary they'll be tracking your transactions.
I am not sure if it would even be possible, but I think it would be a good idea to add upvote buttons to the listview of topics. It would look good on the left beside the topic. Just a suggestion.
I always have to point this out at the risk of downvotes: it doesn't make sense to say that an event you're currently seeing on Earth "happened 21 million years ago."

Both space and time are relative, so if you're choosing Earth as your reference point, the supernova is happening right when you're seeing it.
A little unclear on what the engine is. Doesn't seem to be an actual jet engine, though. This is an RC with a jet engine (two, actually, since it's an F-14): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IXQVh5IbHc
Is it out in book form yet or are they still growing it?
Naruto Shippuden 228
Naruto Shippuden Episode 228 English subbed entitle "Fight, Rock Lee!"Tatakae Rokku Rī!" (闘えロックリー!) will be released on Thursday (September 8, 2011)
I wouldn't. And I'm guessing a lot of other people wouldn't either. I think it's better if TV companies found different ways of making money rather than forcing their customers to watch ads that they don't want to see.
Linus Torvalds now on GitHub
> Everyone knows that anything we see is strictly in the past and already has happened.

Actually, that statement is nonsensical. Choosing the Earth as your point of reference, the supernova is happening exactly when we see it happening.
Yes. I'll be releasing a Django tool this fall (tentatively titled Prometheus), which is essentially a beefed-up django-admin.py startproject, full of best practices for front and back-end development, and sysops stuff, including a fabric script that lets you do this kind of commit to deploy automatically, with any hosting provider or setup (within reason).
Google Desktop Update
3d预测
EFF have some 'weasels' that they sometimes lend out to worthwhile projects. Not sure they would take on this issue though.
No. Why would I watch content with ads when I can already watch the same content without ads?

Content middlemen: you've lost. The 21st century has no place for you. Distribution is now dirt cheap and dirt simple. You can't add any value because you don't solve any hard problems. All you've done for the last 10 years is make content harder to pay for.

Content creators: make content, add it to your website, charge $2 (or whatever) for a DRM-free download, and enjoy money forever. People will pay you for making things if you let them. No, you won't get a billion-dollar lump sum just for coming up with an idea. Sorry, those days are over too.

(Also, I'm not willing to share my 'net connection with big companies. You have money, buy your own bandwidth.)
BOTTEGA VENETA Sunglasses to Make Your Personality Appealing
I can imagine that in 30 years' time you'll be able to purchase time on drones by the hour, and stage your own robotic exploration of the Antarctic from the comfort of your living room.
I've spent about four years as a medical tech working with epilepsy in a neurology lab. Sorry, but this just gets up my nose.

Please stop using 'flashing images' as a way to co-opt epileptics into defense of the issue-of-the-day (that's the only thing I can think of as to why you included it). Yes, some epileptics do respond to flashing images (~15% have the kind required, less actually respond), but the parameters are pretty tight for the bulk of them. The kind of flashing that can trigger a seizure is also monumentally irritating to regular users, and generally hasn't been used since the 90s.

I spent four years in a full-time job where I sat in the dark flashing lights at epileptic and suspected epileptic patients, 4-6 times a day while recording EEG, so I've got a reasonable subjective feel for the kind of flashing that fires it off. I've spent a lot of time on the web, too, and the only thing that even comes close in general use are the flashing-style 'you are the 999999th visitor' ads, and even then they usually subtend too small an arc of the visual field.

For the record, the usual range for photosensitive epileptics to respond to flashing images or lights is 12-20Hz, with a peak different for each patient and with some rolloff at each end. Above 25Hz epileptic responses are extremely rare - I've not personally seen one, but they do exist.

Yes, there are some epileptics that can have a seizure from a single camera flash, and I've seen them, but they're reasonably rare amongst flash-responsive epileptics (themselves an uncommon group). I've also heard of an epileptic whose trigger was orange circles - not orange other shapes, or other coloured circles (anything can be a trigger for a seizure). At what point do you set the bar for rarity?

Sorry, but it gets up my nose - almost every time I've seen someone 'defend epileptics' online, they don't actually know much about epilepsy, and seem more to be using common mythology about epilepsy in order to co-opt the illness to strengthen a point being made.

Of course, two other common forms of trigger, depending on the kind of epilepsy, are stress and hyperventilation (strictly speaking, these are less triggers and more threshold-to-event reducers). In this case, one could argue that frustrating site design works against epileptics...
It seems like the need for better granularity in webhosting horsepower is/was better suited by virtualization. Cute little things, though.
They burned up in the atmosphere. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Roddenberry#Death_and_lega...
As a Canadian, this is disappointing, but not entirely surprising.

And although I can't say that I agree with "Wikileaks the brand" and how they've gone about dealing with actors, issues and accomplices, it's a service that they've obtained and released information like this. Thanks to them, I can peel a layer off my tinfoil hat.
Electric Ducted Fan - EDF. Lots more details from the builder:

http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1111348
DirectTV Drops Out of Race to Acquire Hulu
Then I have to mess around with HTTP headers just so I can watch The Daily Show.
Creating Jobs (NYTimes Mag profiles Steve Jobs, 1997)
No, I'm not dissing the founders. I'm talking about when these companies get bought by larger concerns. Seriously, when was the last time Flickr innovated since they became a Yahoo! property? Disclosure: I've been a Flickr Pro user since 2004, but recently I stopped subscribing.
You didn’t have enough money to eat? That must have been tough. I hope things are better for you now.
sorry, registration required for financial times, i'll find another source...
Ask HN: Any new hacker house in SF/PA/MV? Or room available?
Hi guys,

Need a place in SF or Palo Alto now through Nov (Sept-Nov). Anyone interested in getting together on short-term rentals? Or need a roommate?

Please let me know.

Thanks,
Raj
Even considering they were never sold to the public, I doubt Dell sold many.

They have the same fatal flaw as SeaMicro's "hundreds of Atom CPUs in a big box" servers: lack of ECC RAM support. Also, I doubt they were cost competitive with conventional 1- or 2-socket 1U servers with Opteron EE or Xeon ULV CPUs.
That's a good reason to prefer Linux. If OS X didn't have pretty stable and easy system upgrades and migrations I would miss Linux package managers. Copying the list of installed packages to a new machine and then running aptitude update is just awesome.

I have pretty moderate package manager needs so homebrew is good enough, and when homebrew doesn't have it I just install from source.
Put your cursor on the part of the expression that you want to debug and press F9 to set a breakpoint. Setting breakpoints by clicking in the gutter doesn't work for LINQ like you might expect - you have to use the hotkey.

I frequently hear complaints about debugging LINQ, but Visual Studio supports it well enough. Microsoft could have done a better job informing people about it.
Ramps are not just intended for persons in wheelchairs. They improve access for people with less serious mobility issues such as those with knee or hip problems or elderly people who simply lack the upper body strength to confidently support themselves using a handrail. Forcing such people into stair climbing chairs is absurd...and of cost far more costly than a few ramps or proper architectural design.
The difference in your example is effort - it costs to increase accessibility for people with disabilities, whether it's spending more time on web development or installing a ramp at a building. It's less cost not to do that.

Not allowing blacks/jews/gays is about admittance policies that don't cost, unless they require some sort of infrastructure to be created for them.

It would be good to hear from a UK web designer as to opportunity cost, as accessibility is a legal requirement for .uk sites, if I recall correctly. I imagine if everyone's doing it, it's cheaper from the outset as the pool of web talent is trained in the issue.
Java 7: The Top 8 Features
Under-30 entrepreneurs fail to woo investors with startup pitches
In Defense of Negativity
I'm a tl;dr guy and really hate lisp books.
Student Runs Secret Banned Books Library from Locker
Sleep Problem: Treating Sleep Apnea - Health and Financial Freedom
Cleaning the room! Been there. I think another major productive distraction is trying to stay updated with everything about the startup world. Reading hacker news. Reading about the new startups in 500startups. Checking out my StartupAdvice list on twitter. What's saying Mark Suster today? New blog post? What about Brad Feld? Anything new with YC, what is PG posting today? So much information :):)

I mean all this information is incredibly valuable don't get me wrong. But still is important to know when to step back and stop reading about other startups and what is the right way to do things, because otherwise nothing would get done.
Surprised nobody else has said this in the three hours this has been up, but: Can I skip them? Are they just embedded into an mp4 file that otherwise has nothing special about them? Yeah, sure.

Are they in some DRM'ed format with a player which mandates playing the ads without skipping? No, absolutely not.

It's a null issue anyhow because it's not on the table. Everybody wants to stream you stuff so you can't keep it, and can't accidentally derive any unanticipated value from it. I honestly have no idea what would get people to give up the idea of streaming stuff to you.
If it is possible, could you have them hire you as a 1099 contractor instead of an employee? You would be in charge of taxes and benefits since you would technically be working for yourself (and they would have less say over where and how you do your job). You could start the job while living in the US, and then after you have worked for them for a few months and earned their trust, you could then inform them that you are relocating to another country. Tim Feriss would say that you should inform them after you have already been working from your new location for some time.
The leaks supposedly show Canada bending over backwards to satisfy the US desire for harsher copyright laws... but I think the US was very neatly played. The Canadian government said basically "please write our copyright bill for us and we'll introduce it into parliament" -- and then watched as that bill never went anywhere, because no sane politician supported it. Then Canadian diplomats went back to their US counterparts and said "gee, sorry, we couldn't get that bill passed... you know what it's like when opposition parties control the parliament".

Net outcome? Canada gets brownie points for cooperating with the US, even though they didn't do anything.
Also, that's the best way of putting of the problem for the future to solve it. We have really good ways of dealing with it /right now/, as long as people pay attention to it early in the process of building/creating/designing something.

In a perfect world, we'd do both things at the same time. When people thing about accessibility now they think about people with mental or physical problems, but what about when our generation gets old? The only reason this is not a very widespread problem is that there are very few people with accessibility problems, this will not be the case 10-15 years from now.
Thanks for the links. I'm always interested to hear about Dweck's latest research.

From the submitted article, this passage is food for thought: "The disasters reveal a limitation of the muscle metaphor: certain evolutionarily prepared drives seem to withstand even the most bulked-up powers of will. The authors note that people with the highest levels of self-control are only slightly better than average at controlling their weight, and they describe disturbing experiments that confirm the old saying 'When the penis stands up, the brains get buried' (it sounds better in Yiddish)."

It would be interesting to test, by methodologies proposed by Dweck or by others, just how far willpower can go in controlling the most biologically driven behaviors. There are, of course, some problems with the ethics of human experimentation involved in setting up some of these experiments in rigorous fashion.
I would. Presumably the less informed will have to endure the ads, but I and others like me with the know-how will find a way to skip them if they are too intrusive. One or two 30 second ads... maybe I wouldn't even bother skipping them.

I don't know what the situation in the states is right now, but in the UK the majority of the big channels have Flash-based streaming versions of their shows available online very soon (hours) after they've aired (in the case of the BBC some of the shows are available live). The BBC is publicly funded - so no ads - but ITV and Channel 4, the other big players, do have ads, and most people, anecdotally, have no problem with this given the convenience.

I still download episodes of US shows I or my partner enjoy regularly, but if the networks were to offer these shows on their sites with ads I'd be more than willing to watch them there.

For overseas viewers the problem, as other posters have mentioned, is region locking. If the show is sold to overseas markets they cannot then offer the show to viewers in that market. The model needs to change and incorporate revenue sharing with these other markets - but history has shown us these big businesses are unable to do this sort of thing in a timely manner. And that could ultimately be their downfall.
> Linux has become the most popular Unix variant by a large margin

Really? I thought that was OS X / iOS.
At least, not enough to eat properly. It's ok though- that was years ago, and I learned a lot from those times.
Wait, really? I thought normalization form C was the form where composite characters were always used when possible. Why restrict by the number of codepoints (vs characters) if you're explicitly going to use the form which goes out of its way to use multi-codepoint characters?

The only reason I can think of is that they internally use UTF-32, so counting codepoints is more efficient. But I thought they used UTF-8.

Edit: the other reason I can think of is that conversion to normalization form C already counts the codepoints. Though I can't imagine making it also count characters would be nontrivial.