skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I had a major eyesight scare this year, and it has gotten me thinking a lot more about accessibility.

Thankfully it was just a scare. My family has some eyesight issues, so I've always been curious on how visually impaired users navigate the web.

It helps that in my high school there was a boy that was born blind. He used a braille machine during class, until he got a thinkpad configured with a screen reader. Later he joined a bank working in IT, and I remember he already knew Linux very well during high school (early 00's).

>Can anyone point me to the best resources which might help me understand how visually impaired users navigate the internet today?

I use the Wave accessibility tool [1] on my websites, and whenever I am reviewing pull requests for $work, or Apache, Jenkins (it&plugins do very poorly), and other Open Source sites (latest one was the CWL Conf 2024 [2]).

Another thing I use to test accessibility is try to navigate the site with Orca (with/without looking at the screen). You can install that on any Linux machine, completely free. Microsoft screen reader is better than Orca, or at least was the last time I checked it. But I am a Linux user -- and plan to continue being even if my eyesight gets really bad.

It is relatively easy to learn Orca, you just need to learn a few shortcuts, and the commands to enable/disable it. And testing web sites will help you both learn to use the screen reader, while also helping other visually impaired users if you submit bugs/pull requests.

Here's a great video that shows what you hear when you open a browser with Orca enabled/running: [3]. If you are running Linux just try typing `orca`, then open a browser, and follow this link: [4]. There you can find most of the necessary key bindings to navigate a website with Orca. Give it a try and experiment how that works.

I don't know much about maps, GPT, etc., but I hope Orca and these links will help you to learn more about web accessibility.

[1] https://wave.webaim.org/

[2] https://github.com/common-workflow-language/cwlcon2024/pull/...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UI76P-KPZec

[4] https://techblog.wikimedia.org/2020/07/02/an-orca-screen-rea...
Targeted kidnapping and coercion to extract passwords is not part of the threat model for the overwhelming majority of people.

Likewise for being forced to unlock your phone at gunpoint to get at your accounts. People who are committing individual armed robbery to get valuables are doing it for the raw goods, not as an input to get into your accounts. They’re gonna take the phone, try to flip it, then burn up some charges on your credit cards before the bank cancels them.

I have passwords in 1password. MFA for sites I don’t really care about goes in 1password, as do recovery codes for those accounts. Any accounts that matter, MFA is on my phone and yubikey. Recovery codes are on index cards in a physical safe.
It isn't the car manufacturers job to stop kids from being criminals.

TikTok you are right on the money though. Greatest CCP psyweapon ever invented.
For an overview of how Nucor became #1 in the US steel industry, see "American Steel" (1992) by Richard Preston. The author was present for the building and startup of Nucor's first continuous thin sheet casting mini-mill. Nucor bought a new experimental continuous caster from a German company, after trying to build their own, and built a mill around it. This plant could turn scrap metal into sheet steel. "You could punch garbage cans out of it all day." Gradually, the quality improved, and soon they were making steel for auto parts. Previously, steel recycling just produced lower grade steel - cars in, rebar out. So this closed the recycling cycle.

The amount of steel in use per capita in developed countries seems to have reached a constant level.
About 69% of steel produced in the US is the same steel going round and round. If you ignore rebar, low-grade steel stuck inside concrete, it's even higher. It's the developing countries that are still making and using new steel. They don't have enough steel infrastructure yet.

"Mini-mill", in this context, means "smaller than a square mile". Here's Nucor's Crawfordsville plant.[1] It's not small.
Compare with US Steel's Gary Works.[2] That century old plant is just about their last remaining big plant in the US.

US Steel somehow missed this change.

[1] https://earth.google.com/web/@39.97805108,-86.8271336,264.41...

[2] https://earth.google.com/web/@41.62932676,-87.36187513,174.7...
Anybody since the 70s designing those radial supports out of anything that isn't a polyester isn't paying attention.
I'd like to point out that with a good ad blocker, Spotify free tier with the web client is nearly indistinguishable from Spotify Premium.
A small country winning the war against post WW2 USA seems like it would be a bit of a plot hole.
Crimes had been declining for decades. The last couple years have had pretty significant increases, and violent crime in general is the highest it's been in ten years, for instance: https://ncvs.bjs.ojp.gov/quick-graphics
Do you think it's safe to raise a family where drug deals are happening out in the open?
I think it’s actually indicative that people get a lot of talent on their resume that they can get poached or move into other roles in the industry.
I think it's worth asking why the jobs are in the cities. Given our information economy, why do the jobs need to be in the cities? My theory is that humanity (and subset of it) behave a bit like neural network. Social networks - neural networks. They both process information. And the social network in a city has a better shape. Villages have insular clique-y networks. Sure there are connections outward - but not enough. Ideas cannot spread as quickly. This makes them worse at processing information so they are outcompeted by the cities.
Anything? I tried to send money to someone but the button did not debounce the request and I ended up with more than one payment ?
Where are you? Since you didn't specify, probably the US. There, the answer us almost always a small, local bank or a credit union. If you are elsewhere, please specify.
First Production Lithium-Free EV
The right time to take down Saddam was after the secind gulf war, the first one with US participation. In the first gulf war between Iraq and Iran, Iraq was an US ally.

And no, removing Saddam with good reason was a really bad idea...

To cut it short, in the frame on the war on terror 4.5 million people died, almost a million directly related to the war and 38 million people displaced. If you think all that was a just price to pay to get Saddam and Bin-Laden, because the Taliban pretty much won, you should re-adjust your moral compass.
Where I live it rains for the majority of the year. We could put out buckets and easily capture enough to care for our needs, but then you have to deal with making sure what we are going to ingest is clean and deal with no water pressure and hauling water around the house. It is so much easier to pay someone else to deal with it. So, water could be free some places, but…
The former, but also it's CYA.
Declining compared to pandemic levels. Still astronomically high compared to the late 90s.
Please explain then

The investment horizon is so long that we can't model it. Sounds good!

Looking at Hinkley Point C, Lazard, IEA, NuScale and the French accounting agency the number is $120-180/MWh.

You've found one low quality source which massage the numbers to fit your narrative and continue harping about it.
From the linked pdf: 'In order not to stifle innovation, the rules will not apply to open-source software developed or supplied outside of a commercial activity'

(if you receive donations, it isn't commercial activity. If you display ads like Firefox or Brave, it is)
It’s interesting that the top companies where employees leave often are tech companies. I wonder why this is?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQ09bnZ747w&ab_channel=talkR...
> how is altruism a myth

Much altruism - especially in the Silicon Valley subculture sense - comes with positive externalities. You gain influence, popularity, brand, whatever, from activities that always seem to go well publicized.

If you're gaining something, and you know you're gaining something going into it, can it really be altruistic?
It's not about "feeling" or whatever, it's about behavior and outcomes. You have no clue what it takes to "feel" something so let's get that out of the way.

If something behaves perfectly like a human, you should treat it like one, for your own good if nothing else.
Well, Firefox hasn't nagged me in a long time and you've just installed it, so why not give it a try for a while?

> shitty VPN

The Mozilla VPN is a rebranded Mullvad VPN, AFIK which I understand is very good.

Even if there are a few more nags than Chrome or whatever, I guess, I'm happy knowing that I'm making it a bit harder for Google to know what I'm doing online.
This mix of a binary cache for common compilation options with transparent fallback to source builds when flags are customized is how the youngest generation of source-based Linux distros (NixOS and GuixSD) work, and it's a really nice combination. Congrats to the Gentoo community! I think a lot of people will enjoy this kind of setup.
Like most, I'm convinced of the efficacy of the open source model. I'm convinced that authors should receive reliable financial compensation for their work so the model is sustainable.

Counter to some fears about liability with a move like this, I am not convinced this will result in a negative outcome.

Businesses will pay big bucks to dump liability on someone else. And an author won't accept that liability for free.

I see an opportunity for authors or distributors of open source software to demand a fee for maintenance and shouldering some of some the liability for its use.

I see an opportunity for software professionals to vet the paid consumers of their libraries and, via consult, approve to take on the liability based on sound usage (charging fees to confirm sound usage).

I see an opportunity for a license that requires you, as the consumer, agree to take on all liability via signature if you aren't paying.

Is this not in the spirit of traditional open source? Maybe yes...

Or, maybe it is more like a source available model with as few strings attached as possible to get the story straight.

Maybe this is not a bad thing.

Personally? If the dynamics change so that I can realistically write software for a living independendent from a single company without begging for donations, I would more strongly consider doing so. Incentives here might allow for that.
Not in a post, but here's a few books for you:
Seignorage on a global reserve currency: read "the global minotaur", the story of oil: read "Oil, Power, and War" by Matthieu Auzanneau, and for completeness: "The brothers" by Stephen Kinzer.
The issue with communism/nazism is that they depend on years or decades of political conditioning of populace, so they're even more afraid of accepting new people than they are of the existing ones leaving. Moving in to USSR was even harder than moving out, and they would only do that if you're a good showcase.
US wants to contain China's chip industry. This startup shows it won't be easy
Hand waving the cost there both financially and environmentally as well a “well we assume things will work out” - there will need to be battery storage in the 100s of gigawatt hours and it needs to be cheap reliable and durable

What if they don’t? There’s no assurances there will be magic battery tech

There is a reason China India Russia and others are still building nuclear plants
This kills deep work.
Search engine Kagi unveils integration with Brave Search, new Safari extension
China is actively helping Russia. They’re not neutral, and they’re not simply opportunistic like India. I don’t how much clearer it needs to be aside from China invading Taiwan.
While I think the data is good, the conclusion of "don't want" is downright silly to me, because if you look at all the top contenders, "don't have any better options" seems like a better interpretation to me.

If you work at Apple (company with the shortest tenure), then you likely have tons of other options, and can job hop your way into higher and higher comp. If you work for one of the giant oil companies, where else are you going to go (generally, of course this doesn't apply to everyone equally)? This is especially true in many places where oil and gas jobs are the only working class jobs that pay well.

Edit: other good comment also pointed out that Apple has a huge retail workforce that would definitely bring down the average tenure.
>It is naive to think this industry hasn't considered what label to use for this product

It is not a label, it is scientifically established and accurate name that nobody except some woke and poorly educated Americans wants to change.

The associations of the name with other terms are not correlated with education, they are caused by it, ergo the only proof needed is logical. If you know what it is, you describe it exactly as it really is — clean when burning if compared to coal, producing even stronger greenhouse effect when directly released to atmosphere.
> But it feels pretty safe regardless.

"feels" is such a terrible metric for safety. I guess that's part of the point.

Measuring one's risk of low probability events based on personal experience is inherently flawed.
Every 100 years, the government send a warning and carpet bomb a city to the ground. This for sure would remove all the past vicious of the region affected. That would be something
Prior to mechanically pumped water, wells were within walking distance pretty much everywhere. I believe most/all of the ventilation shafts at least looked like wells, if not doubling as wells.
Now do fentanyl overdose deaths.

Policies of letting crime run rampant are killing us.
Just like the protests were mostly peaceful, the city blocks were left mostly untorched.
Anyone with their self-respect left Wells Fargo years ago. Same for Comcast?

Looking at this list I had the same thought a couple of times: maybe "long time employees don't want to leave" is not necessarily the sign of a wholesome company where everyone is happy and content.
But we still keep buying the products of misery and exploitation. I
guess the smartphone users who saw Foxconn put up "anti-suicide" nets
and carried on shopping as usual don't really care that much?
Aside from the obvious advantages, `git bisect` with rebase-managed trees works to single patch resolution as you would hope. On merge-damaged histories it only traces it to one giant hairball or another, ie, bisect is made useless.
I hope that Firefox on iOS gains extensions soon. That's the main reason I still stick to Edge. It has AdBlock built-in and it syncs with my desktop.
Call it what you want you still need an always available always there source of power to ensure demand is met. In the PNW hydro fills this role, elsewhere you will need something else and only nuclear really can fulfil that need
The end of that paragraph continues in the same line:

> Worse still, how will you in turn identify or sue the collaborator or collaboration that actually wrote the faulty open-source code to recoup your costs? In that case, the license you signed likely insulates your open-source partners from your claims.

I sincerely hope this will never become a possibility. The chilling effect would presumably be catastrophic for Free and Open Source software in the relevant legal jurisdiction. Why would anyone voluntarily release their code as FOSS if it opens them up to lawsuits?
Yeah, this is simply a chart of worker mobility. I think you nailed that one.
Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

https://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-...

It's a classic, and also a pretty easy read. If you're in technology and haven't read it yet, you should.
Thank you! That is definitely an interesting language. However, it seems like development has stopped. The GitHub page says: "Note: For personal reasons, I'm on an extended break from the coding side of Vale, feel free to DM me on discord for details. - Evan Ovadia"
Working at a tech giant for 1-4 years and then going off to do your own startup (or jump to another startup) doesn't seem bad in anyway. Different from spending a 20-40 year career at one place, but...
I'm deep in one of the most violent areas of South Side Chicago. People always telling me to be safe. Sure, there are gun battles every night, but it doesn't feel inherently unsafe in the neighborhood. The biggest risk is just living in a house near a gun battle where a stray bullet will get you. Otherwise all the shooting is gang-on-gang violence, sad as that is. Young kids just killing each other for points.

As practically the only white guy in a couple-mile radius I get given a wide berth because everyone assumes I must be police.
Do Kenyans that classified data for chatGPT count or are they all well paid? What kind of jobs are these?
It’s often easier to rebuild rubble using other people’s money than to modernize in-place using your own.

Beyond just the “whose money is buying?” is that the latter costs you current production while the bombed-out scenario has no current production to forego.
I think it's generally the opposite, and the rankings kind of validate my general model of companies.

There's a continuum of "good/bad" to customers & "good/bad" to employees, and companies are rarely good to both.

Some of the most popular consumer facing brands are terrible places to work. One cynical reason may be that they know there is an unlimited supply of bushy tailed workers ready to replace you once they exhaust your will to live. Another less cynical reason might be that to create the best products requires the hardest work, most competition, and generally it burns people out.

It's worth going into the interview process understanding the risk/reward profile. Some companies are high stress & turnover, but at least pay you for the hazard. Others not so much.
I'm quitting Spotify because after all that whining about Apple not playing fair, they haven't implement airplay 2, or siri support on homepods.
One example I thought of is to use the ability to tap into exceptions being handled to audit for places where performance could be improved by swapping exceptions for sentinel values.

Iirc there's a significant performance penalty for raising exceptions. So you could tap into exceptions being handled to see something like "requests that fail validation raise an exception, and this happens often enough that we could get a performance boost by returning a sentinel value instead".

Another idea is that you might be able to use the conditional hooks to write a tool that can suggest re-ordering your if-elif-elif-else kind of statements so that the most common path is first, and prevent evaluating the other possibilities more often.

At a high level, it's just machinery for getting metadata about your code's runtime as part of the interpreter. You could probably write a lot of this as decorators, but because this is part of the interpreter it's decoupled from your frameworks/libraries/etc.
Shout out https://sapling-scm.com/ who makes this workflow even better.
> even at increased cost or less selection

This is fascinating though, because our local farmers' market (Alemany in San Francisco) has like, 3 time more choices than any single grocery store. There's clearly different stalls marketed at different social-economical groups too, from the crunchy super-organic store to the asian grandma favorite stall and everything in between.
When I buy a car, I'd like to see the manufacturer of the car make it not absolutely trivial to steal-- so it does make it kind of their job. ;)

Making a car comically easy to steal will have an impact on car theft rates. It's obviously not the only factor.
> any more than license checkpoint (which the courts have also ruled isn't a violation)

Personally, I think that was a terrible ruling. Any suspicionless stop and check/investigation/search in a place everyone has a right to be should be treated as an unreasonable search.

The pharmacy records checks you're describing here are based on evidence that would likely hold up as probable cause in court.
Now try putting headphones on. I can notice the difference between premium and free tier audio quality.
OpenBSD maintained several local patches to nginx, such as chroot [0] by default and reallocarray fixes, but it was rejected by the upstream and too big to maintain locally.

OpenBSD httpd would probably have never existed if nginx upstream reacted differently.

https://www.openbsd.org/papers/httpd-slides-asiabsdcon2015.p...

[0] The OpenBSD nginx port still includes the default chroot patch, ~8 years later, see https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sthen/nginx_chroot_patch/a... and https://github.com/openbsd/ports/blob/master/www/nginx/Makef...
> The real web is built on links. Hyper ones, in fact. Links you can share on your website. Links you can send to your mates

It BOGGLES MY MIND how even at companies that are built with incredibly advanced technology practices, people still build tools that don't have hyperlinks to either:

- other related tools (e.g. alerting system to config system)

- documentation or other useful information

In fact, "yeah, it uses this technology from the 1990s that you may have heard of: hyperlinks" is a phrase I use at least once a month. Everyone chuckles and then says "hey, that's pretty handy that A links to B directly".

That and "Have we thought about building the 'Internet Movie Database' version of this where you can jump from host to switch to multicast config only using hyperlinks?" is another popular saying of mine.
here i was thinking we'd be treated to a post about quitting as an employee

i mean, good for the author and i agree with a lot of the enshittification of music streaming apps, but yeah not sure this particular post is hn material
Same but with macOS.

The only cool thing about it is that it’s declarative: nix-darwin everything and a fully working and customized machine is up in 10 minutes with one command
I wonder how Nintendo, Valve and FromSoftware does.
I’m on my way to this setup :) I have a 43” 4K and a 4K 27” on a swivel. But driving 3 displays I’ll need to upgrade from an M1 MBP.
It's a comedy, one I feel I ought to watch at some point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mouse_That_Roared_(film)
One of them returns articles primarily from CNN, AP, Fox News, etc. All of the MSM organizations that 70% of Americans do not trust. Even for things that have nothing to do with $politics, I’m always getting these trash results from Google.

Yandex at least returns results from some of the above but at least has a mix of third party websites, indie news sites, forums, etc.
Black market drugs are still a thing even if you make marijuana legal. That market will always self regulate with whatever means available, which primarily is guns.
Most favorited articles by the top 10k most active HN members (2020)
Discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24351073
Maybe old school companies attract old school employees who exhibit old school retention perhaps?

Whereas the hottest companies attract employees who are more career and development focused who are more likely to switch every few years?

Just guesses though.
Because those employees have lots of options.