skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
WARNING: strong opinions, e.g. flames, follow. Don't bother reading if you're easily offended.

At the rate we're going, most websites will never be easily navigated by blind people. How do I know? Easy ...

My eyesight isn't as great as it was when I was younger. So I like to set my "Minimum font size" in Firefox to 18 pt. (Yes I know they're not technically considered "points" any more). That single simple change fucks up a lot of the web! Just that, nothing more. And it's something that any web designer could trivially test for.

And yet they don't bother! Why? Probably because they're mostly self-centered 20-something hipster douchebags, who can't even imagine there's someone with worse eyesight than they have. Or maybe their sense of "aesthetics" trumps any consideration of "accessibility". In other words: "Fuck off if you're too old to comfortably read 10 pt type. We don't need your kind on our website".

Worse, there are a few sites, such as Bloomberg, that somehow manage to trick Firefox into not rendering their fonts at a minimum 18 pt, but instead render substantially smaller. That's right, some hipster web designer at Bloomberg went out of his way to make sure the text displayed is small. He's probably quite proud of this.

Firefox does works OK on 99% of the web in terms of font size. Unfortunately, stuff breaks in other ways. E.g. when a large minimum font is selected, text often simply disappears off to the right of a page. So then a search box is just not displayed at all, because it's off to the right of the page. Or text just disappears off the bottom of a block. Probably something to do with fixed widths, I don't know I'm not an HTML guy.

Chrome apparently has a large contingent of hipster douchebags working on it. Apparently the concept of "18 pt" is too technical for their genius IQ brains. So they just have simpler font size selections such as Small, Medium, and Large. Unfortunately not granular enough when compared to Safari or Firefox. And Chrome is also far worse than Firefox in displaying pages in tiny type, even when Font size is set to Large.

Still, lots of sites do it right. E.g. Hacker News is no problem. A very simple layout and very readable. (Now if they would only fix that expired link problem).

I repeat, I'm bitching about something that is trivial, a mere inconvenience, compared to what the blind encounter. And yet I run into many web sites and browsers that can't even get that little bit right. So what hope is there for the blind? No nope, none at all!
Why I stopped contributing to Vundle
Why do you say that? Shazam does it too, since 2011 when it acquired Tunezee to power that functionality.

http://gigaom.com/2011/06/15/shazam-makes-first-acquisition-...
It won't be a good thing for the economy, more people on the dole is never a good solution. The ACA was only going to "work" if it had enough healthy workers paying into it, having larger numbers of unsubsidized players.

With so many dropping into the clearly subsidized roles this will push the costs of the program up. With the guarantees to the insurance companies built into the law the public will end up footing an even larger bill which requires increase taxes and health care costs for those working putting a bigger drag on the economy.

Having more part time jobs which is what will happen when the employer side of this kick is not better that keeping full timers.
I'm not sure I fully understand your comment. My understanding of this is that even after the revised accounts the auditor was still unwilling to put his name on the line. The implication in my eyes is that the books are still in pretty bad shape and could be worse.

Is there some reading of this that I'm not getting?
I've updated the blog post to also include traceroutes from the 2 sites. I'm not a networking expert, but since the traffic is ultimately going through the same network - peering should be a non issue. Feel free to let me know if this is significant or not.
Please don't upvote this: the title is misleading. It's a repackaged LA Times piece on gentrification and gang members leaving a specific neighborhood.
Defining your life around money goals is probably a bad idea period. If you can, do what you love.
PDF files have similar issues. Acrobat can attempt to read them out loud, but unless the PDF author adds extensive annotations, Acrobat has no idea about the "structure" of the document.

For example, headers are just more text. Tables and figures that "float" to the top of a page, or in any other way interrupt the text, get read in the visual, not the logical, order. Images get "read" as a stream of binary data. Equations get mangled horribly. Etc. etc.
You underestimate the power of marketing, design, and timing then. A good product is not a prerequisite to being popular by any means (although it certainly helps).
Yet another chance for Adobe to try and get people to install McAfee which is an "Optional offer" but checked by default. Bad form.
To be fair, all laptop batteries die, and many laptops have inadequate cooling (this 2011 17" Macbook Pro certainly does).
Why is it when an article is written talking about the downfall of Silicon Valley, or talking about other great tech oriented cities, that Chicago is hardly ever mentioned. Chicago is the third largest city in the country with a booming tech culture here.
Race and ethnicity is an accident of birth. Nationality is shared culture, values, beliefs, and institutions. I spent the first five years of my life in Thailand and Bangladesh. My parents spent the first forty of theirs in Bangladesh. My ethnicity is fixed by that. But when we came to the U.S., we happily embraced the culture and values of the country. And having been in a position to compare them, I think it's foolish to say those have nothing to do with anything and are nothing to be proud of.

Why do Indians and other people from the subcontinent thrive more often in America than in their home countries? Because nationality does matter. Because while you can hold whatever beliefs and attitudes you want, your personal success and ability to achieve depends on the prevailing culture. The culture of your school work place, teachers, friends, potential employees, government. And American culture and institutions are conducive to success in a way success in ways Indian culture and institutions aren't. And that's something to be proud of. That's not something that arises passively. That's some thing we work together to build and nurture. That's something people fought for. The people who struggled to fight racism and sexism or corruption or lack of education, or the numerous other scourges still deeply ingrained in India, contributed something lasting to our culture, something that continues to accrue benefits to people who live here and adopt our ways.
> If the CBO believed in the effect you postulate, they would not predict fewer jobs.

They're predicting a smaller labor force (non-institutionalized population of working age working or actively seeking work) resulting from the reduced health insecurity from the ACA, not fewer jobs. [1]

To see where that fits into the unemployment picture, understand that the unemployment rate is (1 - (Filled Jobs / Labor Force)).

> Also, increasing wages in a recession is a big no-no if you believe in Keynesian economics

We're not in a recession. We're in an expansion in which both wages and employment rates have recovered slower than normal -- which was also true in the last expansion between the 2001 recession and the Great Recession -- which is why it feels like we've been in a 13 year recession to many people who aren't major capitalists, though there have only been 26 months of official recession in that period.

[1] The ACA effect is described on p. 14 of the report [2], which is linked from the NYTimes article, in the section under the heading "Labor Force Participation" (heading on p. 13).

[2] https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments...
I think it is funny to note that the old style of video game map, a square area where walking over one edge makes you appear at the opposite edge, more closely maps to a toroid than a sphere.
I'm pretty sure the whole point is that the planet has to be spinning fast enough that the apparent gravity on the inside equator is roughly equal to the actual gravity on the outside of the equator.
One of the philosophy scholars you mention, Alain De Botton, wrote an entertaining and insightful book called How Proust Will Change Your Life (or something along those lines).

His goal was to make notoriously dense writings accessible to everyday people who are interested in literature.

I think this piece about life as a video game has a similar goal. Just as I would rather learn about Proust through Alain De Botton, I would rather learn about philosophy through the contemporary vehicle of video games.
Neither has 73 Prime Numbers. We believe our technology will stand the test of time. http://73primenumbers.com/
Trapped by tl;dr
PipelineDeals and Pipedrive are both I've used and would recommend. If I had to narrow to one, I'd go with PipelineDeals.
I have experienced exactly this on Comcast. Suddenly, about two months ago, Netflix and Hulu became terrible to watch. I thought maybe it was my cable modem, so I upgraded it and still no luck. So I signed up for a VPN service and tested watching Netflix and Hulu both on the VPN and off.

Sure enough, when on the VPN, I get the highest quality picture. When I disconnected the VPN, Netflix dropped down to about 500kbps. Terrible.
It is theoretically possible, but as we all know, the law is processed by machines with free will, which makes the outcome non-deterministic.

Schools were forced to desegregate largely through court orders, so requiring that law enforcement enforce the laws that they have recently chosen not to ignore uniformly rather than selectively is certainly possible via court order--but not very likely, in my opinion.
I realize this sounds snarky, but I'm just a North American from the middle of that continent...

Who is deemed capable of deciding which political groups to infiltrate? It seems to me that there's a narrow line between manipulating politics the way you want them to go and observing threats.
But this is the attitude Microsoft needs to eliminate. The days of making money on operating systems is rapidly fading away. They already gave away Windows 8.1 as a free upgrade, so they're aware of it.

An open source XP would get many hackers interested in Windows, something they desperately need.
It would have been nice to have some other races... as starting points/included in the strategy guide at all.
Yep that prevents turbo which stops it from shutting down. Crippling the CPU is a pretty annoying fix, though.

Switching to the onboard Intel GPU works as well, but that means foregoing hardware decoding which means a bunch of things run like glue. I actually ended up just replacing the fan which solved the issue for at least another year until I can get a new copmuter.
Bitcoin on the cover of Hacker Monthly #45, free digital edition.
Things You Did Not Know You Can Do With Philips Hue and IFTTT
The one time I dealt with Autonomy was sitting in on some of the sales process to a large non-profit. I hadn't really heard of them or seen their products anywhere at all, yet they were apparently doing well. I think this was around the time they bought Verity so there was a lot of buzz in the air that Autonomy could be the next Google and it'd be good to get in with them.

During their 20 allotted minutes, the Autonomy sales guy provided an hour long virtuoso demonstration of a decidedly uninteresting basic search appliance with an enormous price tag that would have bought them six times as much if the non-profit just hired a staff to build it all from scratch from the ground up.

The non-profit was looking for big-data analytics and got a demo of some very uninteresting, very basic, text analytics tools, and a half-hour dog and pony show about how they could build whatever more sophisticated analytic tools they needed, and oh yeah, there would be a very long and very expensive enterprise integration period.

The sales guy then made sure to mention that the next day he wouldn't be able to do any follow up since he took a position in another sales office in a different state, so follow up with some other guy who wasn't present at the demo.

Of course having run well over their allotted time-budget (always a great way to see if a company respects contractual budgets), the CEO didn't have time to ask questions like "presumably you've built more interesting text analytics tools before, we can't be the only ones asking for these pretty basic things, why would we pay more for you to 'develop' them again?" and similar.

Fast forward a week, meeting with the other guy to finish feeling things out (there were some integration pieces they were still interested in). The non-profit was basically told that his business wasn't worth the time of this very junior sales guy because his other clients were talking about bigger engagements. And that to get more of his effort, they'd have to consider a larger package with more included services (on-site consultants). He left halfway through the meeting to go joke and throw a football with some of his buddies down the hall for a few minutes, in full view of our group, while the CEO of the non-profit sat his mouth agape, came back and asked if we'd decided to move on or go with the bigger deal so we could get his full attention.

It was pretty much this experience that put them into the "corrupt as fuck snake oil peddlers" category for me and none of this news surprises me in the least.
I have some kool-aid I'd like to sell you.

Desktop versions are close irrelevant to this discussion.

Office web apps are completely irrelevant, I think. I've never met anyone who has ever used them. 100% of people I know who use web apps use Google's.
How to become an entrepreneur (2013)
Though one's nationality may be an accident and one can understand the futility of the pride, how can one ignore the way world treats people based on their nationality?
You may not have read the article of the CBO report.
Sunrise: The best alternative to you iOS calendar app
TLDR; 37signals -> 1 signal: "basecamp"
Apparently very few of you read the article...

It's a smart way for a rapper to market his music. I chuckled as I watched the video, and learned about a rapper I hadn't heard of before.

Harmless fun.
Hourly people want more income not more hours, People don't want 12 hour shifts and they shouldn't have to do it to earn a living wage.

A company needs to pay what that costs or their not worth being a company.
Generating Files with JavaScript and Ember.js
I haven't done this calculation, so I'm not going to immediately say you're wrong, but the example you use (a hollow sphere) doesn't generalize to other shapes.

Gravity is zero inside a hollow sphere or inside a hollow infinite cylinder. Here's the conceptual reason why. Imagine that you're near the left side of the sphere or cylinder. Then the mass to your left is closer to you, and therefore every kg of it exerts a strong gravitational pull (as force is proportional to 1/r^2). But although the mass to your right is farther away and thus exerts less gravitational force per kg, there's a lot more of it: roughly speaking, the amount of mass in a given direction is proportional to r^2 (times the solid angle it subtends). This factor of r^2 precisely cancels out the effects of the 1/r^2 weaker force per kg. (And yes, a careful derivation using calculus or Gauss's law would be more rigorous.)

None of that applies in the case of a torus. If I'm in the hole of the torus close to the left side, there's still a 1/r^2 difference in gravitational force per kg favoring the pull toward the left. But now, roughly speaking, the extra mass to my right is only greater by a factor of r (coming from the circumference of a circle rather than the surface area of a sphere). So the far side of the torus becomes less and less significant the father away it gets.

On top of all that, my impression from the article was that this sort of planet would require a really fast rate of rotation. I get the sense that the virtual "centrifugal" force plays a major role in the physics here. (Or if you prefer, that it's not reliable to ignore the effects of being in an accelerated reference frame.)
Ahem. Grumbling and bad jokes aside, you're right. The fact that Adobe believes it's already being exploited is unusually concerning.
Does Netflix actually stream video data from AWS or from other CDNs? Can the OP compare the route to AWS to the route to the Netflix server?
Brilliant. The sandbox example rox.
Just to add, Alain De Botton also has several documentaries exploring philosophical ideas at a layman's level.
If what you write is true, GCHQ (and, by extension, the rest of the "Five Eyes") must have the most amazing Porno Stash on the planet!
"No one in New York drove. There was too much traffic."

-Fry, Futurama
Most of the obvious guru addresses are already gone, and GoDaddy is still doing preorders (5am NZ is still another hour from now).

I've seen a couple, but nothing that makes me want to spend $40 on.

Basically all generics are taken already (code, software, IT, devops, etc). Most languages are gone, except for Golang and Erlang. I checked a few frameworks, and RubyOnRails is still available, but stuff like Django is out.

I didn't do an exhaustive search though.
Desperately Seeking Soulmate? Please, Stop Already
So what does the legal roadmap look like going forward for the FCC?
Very cool and fun. However, I think we need to stop talking about this 80 years nonsense. My grandad is 83 and ran a marathon last year. He still works everyday, and talks about where his company will be 15 years from now. I have 6 great aunts alive in their 90s or older (I just attended one of my great aunts' 100th birthday parties over the holidays).

The point is that the human body if treated well in the ideal conditions is meant to live 120 years or so. Over time, litte damages we do to it like not get enough sleep, drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, eat trans fat, take drugs, stress at work add up to years off.

No one is perfect, and just about everyone will end up taking a decade or two off this max even if their goal is not to. But living to 100 while still enjoying life should be everyone's goal. Remember that having a 100 year life span gives you 25% more life than 80. That's a really big difference and enhances your perspective greatly. I don't feel that life is over at 35, in fact it's pretty much just getting started.

And this is all not counting any technological advances that may enable us to drastically increase our lifespans. I hope Mr. De Gray and Kurzweil are correct. But even if they aren't, you should shoot for at least 100.
America needs more immigrants like Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s new CEO
Why Does Our Hair Turn Gray As We Age?
Why on earth did they not cut out the first 13 minutes of this video?
The thing that Basecamp does well is that it is a generic project management tool that can be used for any kind of project - thus its wide appeal. The most interesting alternatives are ones that specialize in particular types of projects. For example, if you are a designer there is Solo and if you are a product manager there is my product Aha! - http://www.aha.io. These alternatives specialize by taking the common elements of project management software (like todo lists, calendars and comments) and tailoring them towards a particular job function.
The fun thing is that there's a high probability that the ancient aliens still get to meet us, but a low probability of us meeting them.
So, with rising demand you'd expect rising prices which would in turn suppress demand. Unless the object in question becomes a luxury good, in which case rising prices would in turn contribute to an increase in demand due to conspicuous consumption (can't be sure of the net effect but I'd speculate it'd be an increase or flattening of demand at worst).

What would be the economic solution to this problem? One way would be a moratorium but that seems politically unpalatable. One could hope that a previously sidelined fish makes a comeback and replaces Bluefin as the sushi staple; controlling tastes seems hard if not impossible so that would be unlikely as well. Maybe convince a celebrity chef to endorse a cheaper (and less endangered) fish?
I was amazed by the production value of a recent League of Legends tournament - I mean, look at the stage: http://i.imgur.com/pSpoBjWl.jpg

This is the crowd - http://cdn0.sbnation.com/assets/3517059/league_of_legends_wo...

IMHO this is beginning to rival professional sports tournaments in every way possible. The viewer count (couple hundred thousand) might not me a lot compared to football, but is still pretty significant :)
MoveYourDomain Day 2014
Ask HN: Building the next generation PaaS
Inspired by this John Gruber quote

"Cloud computing is one potential path forward. The cloud is nascent, like the PC industry of 1980. In 30 years we’ll look back at our networked infrastructure of today and laugh, wondering how we got a damn thing done. The world is in need of high-quality, reliable, developer-friendly, trustworthy, privacy-guarding cloud computing platforms. Apple and Google each have glaring (and glaringly different) holes among that list of adjectives."

http://daringfireball.net/2014/02/microsoft_past_and_future

What features is a PaaS like Heroku currently missing?

What feature set would make up the most optimal PaaS?
see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7184030

I was also very unimpressed with their stock technology. And it was obvious they were trying to attach as many consulting hours to the sale as possible.

It felt like a very old, late 90s era search engine, one of the ones with lots of banner ads, with a few of the internals exposed so you could get various metrics off of it.

> needed a consultant in every week to try and tune it

This also feels familiar to me, something about constantly massaging the system till it started giving optimal results or something. I think "tending the garden till it bears fruit" was the phrase used (it was almost 10 years ago now!)
> So ISPs are desperate. Their costs are spiralling out of control

Isn't the cost to deliver a gigabyte of traffic something less than five cents, and decreasing?
IIRC netflix runs pretty much everything out of AWS.
It seems our government is really paranoid about this stuff.

For school, when buying a Texas Instruments launch pad, I had to go through ridiculous processes to get the micro controller.
I'd say - set yourself a comfortable base by selling your time and talents (ex. by working as a programmer) and then, if you have enough spare time, do what you love. Going 100% after passion is as dangerous as going 100% after money.
> more closely maps to a toroid than a sphere

It's the very definition of a torus, at least when we're talking about fundamental polygons[0].

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_polygon
I'm a little confused by the average speed reported in their speed index. Not sure about the others, but I know Comcast and AT&T both offer several speed tiers. Is their average speed reported here affected by the percentage of customers who purchase the lowest tier?
I don't think Asana competes with base camp, at all. It's an over customizable nightmare that you need engineers to administer for Big Corps. It competes with Jira. Basecamp is something that a nontechnical person can use.
They were paying for the honor (and publicity) that comes with buying the first fish of the season. Seems pretty routine to me.
Everytime some financial institution tries to promote fear by freezing accounts, they show why bitcoin is so superior.
Nice to meet you, I am as well. Craig is quite a character.

I think the failure also comes from changing the design mid process.