Top accessibility complaints from people with disabilities - <AUTHOR> https://axesslab.com/accessibility-according-to-pwd/ <comment><USER2> What bothers me more than people designing inaccessable sites is their excuse of "well, why put extra money and effort into catering to such a small segment of the population?"

Videos released without captions are OK, because "they're free!" Websites without Aria tags are OK, because "screen readers just need to get better." Low contrast fonts are OK, because "my design won't work with different font colors."

Everyone who doesn't die in their prime of life will eventually be disabled in some fashion; but so few people really seem to realize this (or care).

EDIT: Good question - do I practice what I preach? Yes, I do. I'm in an SRE position, and a few of our developers are hard of hearing, so I caption the training videos I make, without asking if they need them. No blind folks, but I make sure to use reasonable styles and page layouts to support fading eyesight. I don't set up Aria tags myself, because I don't have any users who need them at the moment.

None of my external or OS contributions are to UI related projects, so nothing of note there.

<comment><USER3> Accessibility costs a lot of money and it's a perfectly valid observation that one can skimp on it for profit. You may call it immoral, I call it mathematics.

<comment><USER4> "Accessibility costs money" is a popular thing to say, but I'm not convinced that needs to be true. Okay, fine, captioning/transcribing videos I'll give you, but many of the other issues on this page can be addressed for a web page just by not breaking the defaults.

By default, links are underlined. For text content, many major browsers (Firefox and mobile Safari for sure) include a "reader mode" or similar where the user can adjust their own contrast - as long as you don't break your HTML and prevent the reader mode from working. Web pages are black and while by default, so anything with lots of bright colors is something you have to do intentionally. Animations are also something you have to add intentionally.

It really seems like just by not breaking the defaults (I.e., no work at all) your web page should do a decent (not perfect) job of being accessible. But we're so obsessed with making things shiny and swooshy that we've lost sight of that.

<comment><USER5> >"Accessibility costs money" is a popular thing to say, but I'm not convinced that needs to be true. Okay, fine, captioning/transcribing videos I'll give you,

Even that one is overstated. Sure, taking some _existing_ video, and treating it as the only representation of the content, and then trying to transcribe it -- that's expensive.

But virtually every such video (esp. lectures) intended for conveying information is going to correspond to some text equivalent, and they can just post that in a place that's easy to find. Not only is it cheap, many users who _can_ hear will prefer that version.

I think it's just a widespread attitude problem (for lack of a more refined diagnosis). It's not just big institutions, but discussion forums where some users will stubbornly link a video as their only citation, and won't even take the time to summarize the key point they think it's substantiating.

<comment><USER6> Can you elaborate why do you assume that such videos are likely to have a text equivalent?

You bring up lectures as example - I certainly don't have transcripts of lectures I've given, and neither do most professors/lecturers/whatever that I know; a few of them have most of their talk content in their slides but that's a horrible practice that distracts from effective lecture or presentation; in general all the non-audio material is intended to be a _supplement_ to the talk and either are not meaningful without it (e.g. illustrations) or are not representative of the talk (e.g. a textbook chapter that's mostly about the same topic, but different). The recorded audio ( _if_ it'd be recorded) would literally be the only copy of the content of that lecture in existence.

The same applies for many other genres of video content. Most videos aren't scripted, and thus no script exists; heck, even videos that are clearly well prepared, staged and filmed with multiple takes (e.g. many of "youtube creators") generally don't have a script beforehand, the textual content is improvised on the spot and doesn't exist in written form unless it gets transcribed.

Interviews and podcasts are other good examples - as you say, many users who can hear would prefer to read it, I certainly would, but the obvious reality is that the textual version of those things _does not exist_ unless it gets made, and making it takes much more time than recording the interview or podcast in the first place.

<comment><USER5> I was specifically referring to videos intended for conveying information, not entertainment. If professionally done, it has a script. If a college lecture, it has a corresponding textbook exposition. And you've seriously never written up any equivalent to any lecture content? It's all extemporaneous, all the time, and you can't spare the one time to write it down?

<comment><USER6> We don't have a tradition of teaching from a _particular_ textbook (some universities do, some don't) so generally a lecture would include pointers towards chapters in multiple _different_ textbooks, none of which match the contents of the lecture exactly (i.e. they're supplementary material, extra reading); and even if some lecture was based on a particular textbook, _that_ text (unlike the lecture video/transcript) would be something that couldn't ever be published with a video because of copyright issues.

For my own teaching, no, I don't write up a "script" beforehand, I prepare content and plan for the topics and key points that I intend to cover in this lecture (and the next one, if we go quicker than expected), but the actual content heavily depends on how the students react, what they are (mis)understanding, what are the questions, etc. I don't consider well- scripted lectures a good thing, the lecturers that I know who are more into "reading off a script" give quite weak lectures IMHO.

Preparing in-depth textual material would seem a waste of effort as students would get the same content in the lecture. I wouldn't use it for other students since I'd anyway never give the same lecture twice - research is progressing fast, so my 2016 content is dated now and this year's content will definitely have to be rewritten (and the course restructured) next year. Admittedly, that's context-dependant - my situation is uncommon, there's a _lot_ of teaching that involves lecturing the same introductory topic for many years off of a classic textbook to multiple larger audiences, and in that context your arguments would definitely apply.

But that's actually all offtopic.

The main issue is that _none of this is equivalent to the transcript._ Nothing of what you propose would make the video accessible to a deaf person. A textbook chapter or the lecture materials are _alternatives_ to the video, it helps making do _without_ the video, but doesn't make accessible the part of video where the lecturer is writing something interesting on the blackboard and explaining something that you can't hear.

<comment><USER5> I think you're the one who's demonstrating an atypical case here; most lectures aren't presenting on some rapidly changing topic, and even if they are, there is some Wikipedia text that is kept up to date.

>The main issue is that none of this is equivalent to the transcript. Nothing of what you propose would make the video accessible to a deaf person. A textbook chapter or the lecture materials are alternatives to the video, it helps making do without the video, but doesn't make accessible the part of video where the lecturer is writing something interesting on the blackboard and explaining something that you can't hear.

That's overstating it. The relevant metric is, if some deaf (or video-hating like me) person wants to learn the material, _do they have a useful option_? The fact that you can't make _that specific video_ useful isn't relevant. Even pointing to some text that hits the same key points is major step up, and is trivial to do, and yet most refuse to do, just like most refuse to provide the _one_ insight that they're making me watch a three minute video to hear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Glad to see the lines blurred even more. Accessible design isn't about changing things to check off items of a list - your users' ability lie on a spectrum, and our job is to make sure we aren't ignoring vast sections of that spectrum.

When trying to sell people on Shade[0] I like to explain that good contrast isn't just for people with a visual impairment, but important for folks on old monitors, classroom projects, or even looking at their phone in direct sunlight.

Mega props for Safia[1] for posing this question, the responses in here are super eye-opening.

[0]: [http://halogensoftworks.com/shade/](http://halogensoftworks.com/shade/)

[1]: [https://twitter.com/captainsafia](https://twitter.com/captainsafia)

</comment><comment><USER8> I have Spinal Muscular Atrophy and due to weakness can only use a mouse + on- screen keyboard.

My biggest gripe is sites that load with focus on an element that doesn't allow me to scroll down via the down arrow. This forces me to click the middle of the page to continue navigation via OSK.

Bad: [https://circleci.com/gh/wbond/asn1crypto](https://circleci.com/gh/wbond/asn1crypto) (can't even page down) [https://pypi.python.org/pypi](https://pypi.python.org/pypi) (new pypi might change this)

Good: [https://www.youtube.com](https://www.youtube.com) [https://www.quora.com](https://www.quora.com)

<comment><USER9> This sounds like an excellent opportunity to make an extension for Chrome or addon for Firefox to clear, reset, or set focus on load.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> >Many replies, especially from people with dyslexia or cognitive impairments, were about large chunks of text.

>Huge paragraphs. A page on Wikipedia often consists of many long paragraphs with long sentences. I lose my place within seconds.

I have often felt like a lot of web content writers and editors could benefit from reading books like Stephen King's _On Writing_. Wikipedia in particular is often criminally unreadable when you get to deep-topic articles that are generally only seen by experts in that field. Which makes sense, but I would hope an expert could "dumb it down" for an encyclopedia.

Breaking something down into paragraphs with stupid-easy topic sentences doesn't just help out laymen, it also makes your content just more readable and navigable in general. Plus it's perfect for the web, you can stick an in- page anchor tag there and have a table of contents at the top of your page.

</comment><comment><USER3> _i 'm curious to know: if you have a disability, what's the hardest thing about browsing the web?_

First thing that comes to mind: CAPTCHA. Not all of them have an audio option. If you're blind, you're out of luck. Not to mention, CAPTCHAs these days are so difficult that I feel like robots will soon surpass us at recognizing these oddly distorted characters and words.

Interestingly, the article only mentions CAPTCHAs at the bottom. I wish there was more innovation and theory about CAPTCHAs, I'm personally very fascinated by them, but it's a very difficult topic that is rarely treated rigorously. How do you quantify "hard to recognize for robots" etc.

<comment><USER11> > CAPTCHAs these days are so difficult that I feel like robots will soon > surpass us at recognizing

They already do. That's why they introduced No Captcha[0] in 2014, and Invisible Captcha[1] earlier this year.

[0] [https://security.googleblog.com/2014/12/are-you-robot- introd...](https://security.googleblog.com/2014/12/are-you-robot-introducing- no-captcha.html)

[1] [https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/03/googles-recaptcha- an...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/03/googles-recaptcha-announces- invisible-background-captchas/)

Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not on reCaptcha.

<comment><USER12> Even "No Captcha" is rather annoying as I'm almost ALWAYS asked for additional input. The checkbox alone never does it for me. Why do I seem so bot-ish?

<comment><USER13> You _are_ a bot. You just haven't become self-aware yet.

<comment><USER14> Says someone who's only a part of a simulation...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As a visually impaired person, I can honestly say one of the best things is when accessibility is built into application frameworks.

It's not perfect but it gets you 90% of the way there in a lot of apps that wouldn't implement the features otherwise.

For example, most apps that are built with Microsoft frameworks automatically support high contrast and narrator.

The super awesome part about this for me is if accessibility is built in at the framework level I can develop start to finish with the accessibility features enabled. I don't have to struggle with an inaccessible app until the features are"in".

</comment><comment><USER16> One thing I realized about writing maintainable code applies just as well to designing accessible interfaces: the right habits get you 80% of the way, _with no real cost beyond developing the habits_. Getting into the right habits is an O(1) investment that pays off by making _everything_ you produce more accessible.

Adding alt tags to images, using high contrast colors for text, writing clean, well-structured markup... all these things don't take significant time on top of your normal work as long as you do them right away. They also have additional benefits like making the site easier to parse for search engines.

<comment><USER17> Yep, the 80%-90% level is pretty easily met by doing those along with using the native controls (buttons, links, etc.) properly. When your designers hand you a custom interactive widget, you can add a good chunk (50%-100% extra effort) to your estimate to make it accessible.

I struggle getting designers to consider how a thing is supposed to work without a mouse for instance.

<comment><USER18> a lot of designers I've worked with don't come from a web development background - they typically come from print design. They know how to make things look good, but when it comes to user interaction, or web specific functionality they don't know that they have to deal with much, much more than what you can see in the first instance.

You can't just design something and have it look good, you need to consider what happens in x, y, z scenario, and if you don't have experience, you don't even know those things even exist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm a dwarf with disability in limbs, my biggest concern has been navigation in smartphones/apps; especially since they are growing in size. Fortunately I have good engineering experience and was able to customise my devices (android: pie controls) according to my needs. I wonder whether the reason we didn't see much tweets in the post for people with limb disabilities are because they weren't able to access twitter in the first place.

I must credit smart watches (Android wear/ Apple Watch) here, I'm sure it helps a great deal for people with disabilities. Accessibility is one good reason for not to let smart watches die. I'm planning to write a blog post on this context soon.

</comment><comment><USER20> Simply put, things that are better for someone who _needs_ accessibility are also better for _everyone else_.

Maybe I want to watch something while muted. Maybe I just don't WANT your site screwing with my font size. Maybe it is a lot easier to tab between things than using the mouse. The list goes on.

<comment><USER21> > _Simply put_

But in the real world, this isn't always the case. The article itself is a great example. It uses giant fonts and lots of whitespace, which is good for people with poor eyesight, but it leads to a choppy, hard to follow article. It also forces you to use navigation to follow a chain of thought.

<comment><USER20> I said "needs _accessibility_ ", not "needs large font". Accessibility means that if someone needs to set the font to size 100, they _can_ and the system won't break because of it (e.g. text won't be cut off with no way to see what was lost). It doesn't mean that the default choice is some kind of lowest common denominator that is weird for everybody.

The only exception where defaults must be pessimistic are the settings menus themselves. For instance, a button that increases font size must be large enough for anyone to see; a button that changes language cannot be only labelled with the text of a foreign language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Question for all the people claiming basic accessibility is low effort...

Following your low effort implementations of basic accessibility have you actually tested your website/app with a screen reader or other accessibility tool? Or have you just used some semantic markup, scattered a few aria tags and called it a day?

I have worked on a mobile phone app where the client dictated certain accessibility requirements up front. I can tell you right now if you aren't testing in a screenreader then you haven't achieved basic accessibility. And from my experience, once you start testing with a screenreader you will quickly discover that all those assumptions you have about "all you've got to do is add a few alt tags, pick sensible font colours and use semantic structure" fly right out the window.

Every single app screen we did had an additional test pass by a tester who would use the screen via accessibility tools. The app as a whole had several accessibility test passes during the dev cycle. Both of these test stages would always throw up new bugs that would often require significant rework to get working right with the accessibility tools.

I'll grant that my experience here is in mobile apps, and I accept that the available accessibility tools for mobile are limited and perhaps that was part of our challenge. And maybe the ecosystem is more mature for websites and desktop apps. So this is a genuine question for those claiming it's low effort. Have you actually tested it?

If you haven't actually tested it, perhaps your websites/apps are part of the problem, you just don't know it.

I personally think developing for accessibility is a good thing, and I always do it when I can. I try to follow best practises for accessibility even if the current project owners don't mandate it. But at some point you can't just follow best practise and hope it works, you've got to commit to testing it, and then commit to raising bugs against it, and triaging them through the bug process, and at some point you'll be at a standup 2 days before a release with 10 bugs on the board, 6 of them accessibility bugs, and only time to fix 4. Guess which ones are going to make it into the release.

If my experience follows for other domains, to claim that it has zero or minimal cost is ludicrous. Developing and testing for working accessibility comes with significant cost and therefore of course it's a business decision.

<comment><USER23> VoiceOver is built into iOS and Talkback into Androins. These tools are free and already available in your environment of choice! If as a developer you can't even spend the 5 minutes to turn it on and run your new feature through it then you're abdicating responsibility to the point that you're failing at your job.

<comment><USER22> You've entirely missed the point of my post, it makes no difference if the tools are built in or how quick they are to activate. Have you personally actually tried turning these tools on and testing your app?

My point is that I believe that all the people claiming it's easy are only doing the 'best practise' implementation (which I agree, is easy and doesn't add much time) but without actually testing that it all works smoothly they haven't finished and are just part of the problem.

My point is that from my direct personal experience with similar tools, it does not take 5 minutes. It takes weeks of additional testing and bug fixes to get a large app working smoothly with accessibility tools, after you've followed the best practise for the initial implementation.

<comment><USER23> Yes, I test in VoiceOver and Talkback (although for websites, not apps to be fair). But I dispute the assertion that it takes weeks. It takes a small amount of time _per feature_ to test, and certainly no more than testing on multiple versions of the OS or multiple screen sizes.

If on the other hand you're throwing untested features over the wall to a QA team, then yes, it'll be inefficient. That's the nature of the beast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Video captions are also very important for non-native English speakers (or better say, those who cannot really SPEAK this language) because it's often hard for them to discern English words by ear.

</comment><comment><USER25> Fonts are a big issue, but it's not just the web. Two things I hear frequent complaints about are:

\- low contrast overly thin and small iOS fonts

\- low contrast overly thin very small Mac fonts

This includes myself but I've had this conversation with multiple other people. My eyesight isn't bad enough to require reading glasses but it's not perfect, and the microfonts throughout Apple software gives me eyestrain quickly.

It seems like the glaring white UI and microscopic gray fonts in iOS 7 and OSX Yosemite onward were designed for other designers, and not for users or usability.

<comment><USER26> It's worth pointing out though that iOS has extensive options for enhancing accessibility, like increasing font size and contrast, reducing transparency, removing animations, and so on. To me, this seems like a reasonable compromise.

<comment><USER27> Unfortunately, many many apps ignore these settings wholesale. I actually did a survey of news apps to see which ones offered any text accessibility options at all (or respected the OS level settings). The results are not good, especially among tech company news readers.

[https://hackernoon.com/the-importance-of-text- accessibility-...](https://hackernoon.com/the-importance-of-text- accessibility-in-news-apps-45ac8cca2e9a)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I often browse in bed, and I just can't listen to a video. Other times, I slowly read web page between compiles and don't want to listen to a video. I almost always prefer the transcript.

I also find small fonts difficult because many times I sit farther back to give my "perfect" young eyes a rest. Small fonts are difficult.

I block ads to avoid distracting animations and sounds, and I have no cognitive impairments.

It seems like these guidelines are important: the web isn't an art project, it's a communication medium.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm _NOT_ disabled, and I hate videos without a transcript.

Most videos suck. Giving me a transcript lets me read everything _quickly_ and determine if the video is worth spending an hour on.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm surprised not to see images-of-text being called out here. This is a huge issue on Twitter, since people work around the character limit by using images with lots of text. I've even seen this done on #a11y twitter chats, amazingly.

<comment><USER23> Twitter lets you add alt text to images, no problem there. Just people are lazy...

<comment><USER27> Yeah, never see those used! Do you know if they can be added after the tweet is posted? Or if the text is used in search results?

<comment><USER23> Ah, no idea, I just use my default client (Echofon) to do it when I post an image.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Majority of people wouldn't mind making their sites accessible for the disabled if they had necessary skills to do so. Problem is that almost every Web Designer, know close to nothing about designing websites for accessibility. In fact, most Website Designers can't even make a website to be usable by people with no disability. Focus is on making websites to look fancy.

Another thing I have noticed is that a chapter about usability of websites is treated as an extra. Usually at the end of the book as additional reading. Maybe we need to regulate the industry and make it impossible for people to start practicing without proper training. There are codes of conduct that a lawyer, accountant or doctor has to abide to, but there is none for a Website Designer. No implications whatsoever for not making websites to be accessible. They end up blindly ignoring accessibility because they weren't trained to do it.

Fining companies won't help because 99% of the companies are headed by people who don't need to know if the website is accessible to the blind or not. They just trust the designer to do a good job. The only time they will know they are supposed to make their website to be accessible is when they are getting sued. Problem is that regulation will greatly reduce number of practitioners and greatly increase the cost of website development.

</comment><comment><USER31> > _It's really easy to test, just view your site in greyscale._

This is misinformation: some common forms of color-blindness (protan) affect perceived luminance.

Use the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Yes, they are constraining. You'll quickly realize that the easiest way to comply is not to rely on color to convey information.

</comment><comment><USER32> The U.K Home Office has put together a pretty neat resource to help with accessibility across the varying needs of web users, they've put together a bunch of posters which clearly outline the Do's and Do not's, all in one handy Github repo [https://github.com/UKHomeOffice/posters/tree/master/accessib...](https://github.com/UKHomeOffice/posters/tree/master/accessibility)

</comment><comment><USER33> It's not just the web. I've long been frustrated by the legibility of tiny fonts on laptops with even medium-res screens. Now that Apple has introduced an even higher-res 5K display on the iMac, I find it almost impossible to read some system menus and popups.

When did it become OK for Apple's long-vaunted UI become so user unfriendly? Jef Raskin must be rolling over in his grave. This is definitely NOT "computing for the rest of us".

<comment><USER34> My eyesight is completely OK, but I crank up the font size everywhere. Both Reddit and HN are at 150% magnification, every time I see them on a new device I'm surprised people feel comfortable reading such small text.

<comment><USER35> This. I've been recently wondering if I either sit too far away from the monitor (~60 cm) or my screen has too much pixel density (1080p / 21.5 inches), Because my vision is almost perfect and I can barely read the text on HN without zooming in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> ADHD here. Glad I read this article, it's vindicating to see other ADHD people complaining about animations and autoplay. My God, if there's any autoplaying anything, I cannot read your article. I cannot.

I even had to hide the friends thing in Spotify (the right sidebar that updates what your friends are listening to) by dragging the window slightly off the screen. (Recently found out that you can disable it in Settings which is great)

</comment><comment><USER37> Would it be difficult to make a program that sits in the audio stack (probably on Windows) and tries to run voice recognition on everything coming over the line and then renders anything that sounds like speech at the bottom of the screen?

<comment><USER38> Yes. Youtube tries (tried?) to autocaption videos, and the results were infamously bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Doesn't asking this question on Twitter affect the result, as some people with disabilities might not be able to access that service in the first place?

</comment><comment><USER40> Seems like captioning is a huge issue. Isn't there an audio equivalent of a screen reader?

<comment><USER6> Not really. I mean, there _are_ such things, but the technology isn't good enough (yet?).

Text-to-speech generally works well, it produces good results almost always. If you try hard (or really need to), you can understand even if it tries to "speak" the text assuming the wrong language.

Speech-to-text works somewhat well under certain conditions (e.g. known speaker to which the system is adapted, known domain of text, no accents, no background noise, etc), and even then it gets quite a few errors; if you're just running it on random youtube videos, the results often are _totally_ off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> This is an interesting area, with lots of opinion on implementations. It gets messy, and quick.

So it's normally part of the ADA to make things accessible. But with building, one can retrofit an older building that wasn't accessible with a certain percentage, and still avoid ADA compliance. I had that discussion in an architecture class, how to strictly comply with the law, whilst still skirting around it. The ADA as far as I know also applies to online as well, but the percentage change of a building doesn't really have an analogue with online.

The justification was purely money - disabled people work lower wage jobs, and aren't worth the money spent in upgrading a facility. It's disgusting logic, but there you have it.

I also think of DRM. It prevents end users from fair use (and also carte blanch copying).. Yet it also prevents converting the audio track to text with something like Sphinx. And with the deaf/hard of hearing, many sites prevent downloading and transcribing automatically. Youtube is trying with automatic transcription, and it certainly is a start. It's still hard, given the amount of sounds that are non-spoken that CC incorporates (sound of drums far away) (eerie music with footsteps).

And as mjevans said, what about an individual who releases content and doesn't have the resources to do ADA compliance? Is the correct answer is to ban said content? That seems to go in a really wrong direction as well. But we saw this earlier with (I forget which university) whom deleted all their videos primarily because they were dumped free online, without closed captioning. Instead, we all lost.

And as a developer, how do I determine _how_ to write something that's disability friendly? It seems that flat text HTML with pictures and little/no JS seem to be the way. With pictures, include a alt text with a general description. With a video, include a transcript. Make sure the website will work effectively with Lynx because screen scrapers will tab through when reading.... But can I be sure that the above is correct? One thing I'm sure of, is that I'm missing a great deal of stuff. Red/Green or Blue/Yellow colorblindness, reduced vision, font issues (dyslexic fonts), Captcha handicap issues, and plenty more. How can I guarantee that I'm not just complying with the law, but makes my site usable? As far as I can tell, make a good attempt and wait for a lawsuit.

Then again, coming back to what was told of us in class - its an ugly "formula", but the disabled don't offer much in the way of economic gain, so why is there a reason to cater to them? (No, it's not what I believe, but a hard set of rules that people like Architects consider with regards to pricing with clients. I see no reason why this financial rubric isn't also considered online.)

<comment><USER42> For a building I've always questioned if we should make it accessible, for safety reasons. When a building starts on fire and if you are in a wheelchair you are much more likely to die: no using the elevators, you can't use the stairs or the fire escape.

In my opinion we should require that all buildings be accessible on the ground floor(s). Those who medically cannot handle stairs should be given priority to the ground floor. (this includes any store that might want to sell to handicapped)

Of course wheelchairs are only one type of accessibility. Deaf and/or blind people can be expected to need some accommodation as well, but their needs are much different (and cheaper!) than the wheelchair bound.

<comment><USER43> In all well designed public buildings the emergency stairwells are actually isolated air-spaces (when the doors are shut). Their ventilation systems should draw from a location likely to be free of smoke and they should be at a higher pressure than every possible entry point so that they are positive pressure.

In such setups the /landings/ are life safety zones where those in wheel chairs can wait until rescue arrives to literally carry them down the stairwell (a stair sled might be a good for the rescuers).

It seems that internationally (recently the UK) laws and building codes are not as strict.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I usually prefer text over video, and the point that audio-only content isn't accessible makes for a very compelling argument to always provide a text version. So, in addition to wider reach, it makes it easier to consume the content at a pace you're comfortable with, as well as return later and easily reference specific parts.

For the motion problem, Safari actually introduced a solution a few months ago: the prefers-reduced-motion media query [0]. Hopefully other browsers will follow along and add support. Relevant issues per browser: Firefox [1], Chrome [2], Edge [3]. It doesn't look like any vendor has signaled interest, though.

I don't understand the wall of text point. Sometimes a topic requires a lot of nuanced points and clarifications, which might require long sentences and paragraph. I'm all for making content as approachable as possible, but I don't know if you can reasonably apply it to everything? I think seeing a few examples would probably help me understand.

For the small font size problem, browsers provide a solution! In Safari you can specify a minimum font size in Preferences > Advanced > Accessibility > [x] Never use font sizes smaller than [number]. Firefox also support a minimum font size [4], although the option is a bit hidden.

Too lazy to comment on the remaining points, but this was a really insightful post. I think we need more content like this to help us understand these problems. I'd guess most cases of poor accessibility are due to a general lack of awareness on the part of the development team.

My experience has been that making web apps accessible can be very challenging. There's not much good documentation or examples available, so as soon as you try implementing something more complicated than a traditional website, things start to break down.

In the previous paragraph I was going to reference existing w3c docs to explain my point, so I looked up their latest docs only to find that they've made some huge improvements! Check out the WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices draft [5]. It looks like now every single widget has simple docs and multiple examples. Even if I haven't implemented any widgets with this, just by skimming through, it looks much more promising than any of the previous docs I've seen.]

[0] [https://webkit.org/blog/7551/responsive-design-for- motion/](https://webkit.org/blog/7551/responsive-design-for-motion/)

[1] [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1365045](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1365045)

[2] [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=722548](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=722548)

[3] [https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/257854-microsoft-edge- dev...](https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/257854-microsoft-edge- developer/suggestions/19291531-add-support-for-css-prefers-reduced-motion- media-f)

[4] [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/font-size-and-zoom- incr...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/font-size-and-zoom-increase- size-of-web-pages)

[5] [https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices/](https://www.w3.org/TR/wai- aria-practices/)</comment>


Facebook's Clear History privacy feature is still months from launching - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2018/12/17/18140062/facebook-clear-history-update-privacy-targeting-data-collection <comment><USER2> You're not surprised by this? In spite of all the talk in the article about how this was "not that easy" the real reason probably lies in this bit near the end:

 _" Why can't Facebook just stop collecting your browsing history entirely? Well, it could, but a large part of Facebook's business depends on collecting this kind of browsing data, so it would cripple a big revenue stream."_

As long as Facebook's business model involves monetizing your data, they are going to slow walk any feature that might impact this.

<comment><USER3> Advertisers wouldn't want to hear that part of their campaign attribution (on- site conversions) were null because users have the option to remove browsing behavior. Facebook's people-based marketing is why advertisers use them.

<comment><USER3> I should add context: Facebook has ~20% of the digital advertising marketshare in the US (2018). They are #2 to Google. What both of these two titans give marketers (individual teams within a larger org) is something to brag about. How? Run a campaign for display or video ads in FB or Google and make sure you can tie it to a site action (ideally a conversion of some type). Let that run for a month and then give yourself a big pat on the back. You just drove some cost per action (conversion) number that with some tweaks can improve month over month. Your marketing org is now optimizing! yes! Drive those sales or site visits.

It is a great approach for marketing teams. They grow, look good, claim to drive revenue, try to impact consumer behavior, but it all is dependent on Facebook's (insert any ad platform partner) attribution. So yeah, Facebook will not mess with its attribution. It would make a big mess for both its business and it's client's business.

Marketers's should measure the incremental impact of their marketing buys (get their data science team to manage the study). They will be surprised to see how much display banners or video ads are impacting consumer behavior. Stay away from modeled approaches, try to grade the reporting yourself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > "Facebook currently stores browsing data by date and time, not by which user > it belongs to"

I call bull on this. I seriously doubt Facebook is collecting this browsing history and not associating it with users.

<comment><USER5> Reading between the lines, what this statement actually means is likely "we have a lot of this user data in flat logs, which makes it hard to delete a single individual's data out of the logs, so we need to move from flat user- agnostic logs to per-user structured data".

<comment><USER6> Given their business model of sifting through and selling your data this doesn't seem all that likely that they've left it in gigantic combined flatfiles.

It seems more likely to me that yes, they could do a DELETE FROM BROWSING_HISTORY WHERE USER = "%S", but that's not their business model. Instead they have to add a column to the database that flags data that will be shown to the user or not, and then go through every part of the site where the data might be visible and add a check for that flag. It's a lot more work, and worse they have to get it right the first time because people will be angry if there is a leak somewhere and their supposedly deleted data is visible.

<comment><USER7> Or, maybe, making a product which has to deal with legacy code for billions of users is actually difficult?

Like, we know Facebook is evil, but they can't be _that_ evil, right?

<comment><USER6> > Like, we know Facebook is evil, but they can't be that evil, right?

People keep saying this and they keep being surprised.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > There's a reason that Clear History isn't called "Delete History": Using the > feature will disassociate browsing data that Facebook collects from your > specific account but it won't be erased from Facebook's servers completely, > Baser said. Instead it's just "de-identified," which means it's stored by > Facebook but no longer tied to the user who created it.

I think this is a very important part of the article. History will still exist but not tied to a particular user.

<comment><USER9> Surely we can't be expected to believe they don't have techniques to re- identify that data.

I suppose that's the subtext of what you wrote, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> 'Clear History' goes against Facebook's business model. They will never release a genuine feature like this: the only thing user-facing will be something false only to serve PR.

</comment><comment><USER11> I wish somebody would ask Facebook and other media companies under oath what type of other data they collect from users. A few specific examples:

1\. Does your app collect anything on a mobile device's clipboard and transmit this information to your servers?

2\. Does your app send thumbnails of every image accessible from a device, even if the user hasn't explicitly selected the image for upload?

I'm sure there are other examples, and perhaps device permissions prevent these in ways I'm not familiar with but it'd amaze me if companies weren't grabbing every bit of data they could, including the above two scenarios.

<comment><USER12> I'm pretty sure they did multiple times. Even recently in the past year. They just lie and there seems to be no consequences for it. At least after 2012 when they lied the government can go after them but they're still looking into it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Meanwhile, the D.C. attorney general sues Facebook over alleged privacy violations from Cambridge Analytica scandal [0][1].

[0] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/19/dc- atto...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/19/dc-attorney- general-sues-facebook-over-alleged-privacy-violations-cambridge-analytica- scandal)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18717180](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18717180)

</comment><comment><USER14> Figure out how much the average user brings in in revenue per month, add the option to disable all tracking for that amount per month. I don't see what's so hard. I'd imagine most people don't care that much and the ones that do have an option now.

<comment><USER15> Someone on HN explained the problem to me like so:

Assume Facebook brings in $10/user/month in ad revenue.

But the distribution is uneven; $50/user/month for rich westerners, $6/user/month for poor people in poor countries who outnumber westerners 10:1.

If you offer everyone the chance to go ad-free for $10/month, your income from rich westerners drops from $50 to $10 and your total revenue drops to $6.36/user/month.

<comment><USER16> They can pull a Tinder and charge arbitrary amounts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> facebook recently allowed users to delete messages which was cool (i deleted a bunch of ny old wierd messages)</comment>


Ask HN: Points or hours for time tracking and estimation? - <AUTHOR> I've been meaning to try and get better at estimating my work, but I figured I'd start tracking to figure out exactly how long I take on things to begin with. I've been on the fence of whether to track by time or hours so figured I'd reach out to the community to see what people feel as a good pick now? Whether it be on a team, individual, or what have you. How do you track progress? What do you like or dislike? And what kind of software (or nontechnical system) do you help manage the data? <comment><USER2> At work we use story points (Fibonacci series) to estimate tasks. At first, when we were deciding between time and story points, I wasn't totally on board with the idea of story points because the size of a point seemed completely ambiguous--you could even define 1 point to be an hour or day making them equivalent. Some argued a benefit was that our estimates couldn't be used against us if a task took longer than estimated. However, since a team velocity is tracked it seemed that the story points could still be converted to a time estimate. In the end though I have come to appreciate using story points, specifically Fibonacci points, for three main reasons: 1) Time estimates never seemed to be accurate; 2) In my experience it's easier to gauge relative complexity; 3) Using Fibonacci numbers inherently models the "fact" that larger tasks are harder to estimate.

We use JIRA for tracking.

I must say though in the end estimating things still always seems like a waste of time to some extent. I think it's more important to just have a prioritized backlog. I'm also always reminded of the following excerpt from the book Peopleware: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14371140](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14371140).

</comment><comment><USER3> In Riter ([https://riter.co/](https://riter.co/)) we use "clean" and "dirty" hours for time tracking. You can read about them here: [https://riter.co/docs/time-tracking#estimation- types](https://riter.co/docs/time-tracking#estimation-types).

If briefly, developers estimate tasks in clean hours (or minutes), that's approximate time they need to implement this particular job (without taking into account time required for solving technical problems, meetings, reading manuals and so on). As a rule, developers can estimate clean hours rather accurately. But not dirty hours – they are less predictable for most of us.

When working on tasks, developers specify clean and dirty hours spent on them. Based on different estimates, we can calculate the coefficients of performance and accuracy of all developers and more accurately estimate the deadlines in the future. We plan to use AI later to obtain more accurate deadlines on the basis of these coefficients and collected statistics.

As far as I remember, we have described why we don't support points estimation here: [https://riter.co/blog/time-estimation- missteps](https://riter.co/blog/time-estimation-missteps).

</comment><comment><USER4> The case for points over time estimates as I understand it, is that humans are not necessarily good at estimating in terms of time. We are good at estimating complexity in reference to other similar things. You can estimate that a new task is more/less/the same complexity as a similar task performed in the past more accurately than how long it will take.

After a while of doing this (as a group, not individually), you can get a velocity that starts to give you a good historical estimate of how long it takes to complete a given point, and use that to have realistic commitments for your work.

Note that one team cannot be compared to another because each group will estimate differently, with one group maybe estimating more conservatively, so their points and velocities will seem bigger and more productive than other groups. This is the reason why management should not use velocity as a performance indicator.

Since you need a history of estimating to get the velocity to accurately plan, this system is unreliable if the team is constantly switching out teammates. At my company we switch up the teams pretty often, so pointing doesn't really work well for us in this case.</comment>


I Did a Thing on a Hill: On Meaning and Purpose in Games - <AUTHOR> http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/11/03/i-did-a-thing-on-a-hill/

<comment><USER2> Too long, worth reading. This is a writer who enjoys words and uses them with care.

I just really enjoyed this, thank you for the link.</comment>


Ad code 'slows down' browsing speeds - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47252725 <comment><USER2> Looks like the user just can't win - either we get super annoying and intrusive ads or poorly written ad code that slows downs pages and ruins the experience.

</comment><comment><USER3> I toggle JavaScript on only when it's absolutely essential—which for me isn't very often. On my machines ads have been 'yesterday' for many years, I simply never come across them in the course of my normal browsing! To achieve this, my first line of defense is killing JavaScript. Moreover, killing JavaScript is not only the simplest method of getting rid of ads and trackers; it's also the single most effective way to do so with minimum effort! Every extra step of the ad-killing process, ad-blockers, etc. is just extra bootstrapping for a system that's already running at 80-90% efficiency.

There is absolutely no other process or combination thereof that can speed up web pages as quickly and effectively as does killing JavaScript. Without JS scripts running on web pages the increase in page rendering is really quite startling, pages display almost instantly and do so without those nasty delays, hesitations and stutters. In fact, if I accidentally leave JS on then forget about it, the next time I use my browser I'll detect it's presence almost instantly (even if there aren't any ads present) simply by virtue of the way pages work and display—everything just runs so much more sluggishly with JS switched on!

Every non-JavaScript user knows these secrets but we know there's little point in telling the world about them, as the millions of unfortunate addicted lemmings who use Facebook, Google and Amazon etc. have actually become addicted through the mechanism of JavaScript, thus it's become impossible for them to quit using it.

Like any addictive drug that's not yet been regulated, JavaScript has become the web's 'electronic heroin' and it underpins just about everything these Big Tech companies use to addict users—essentially, JavaScript is central to all of their additive apps, without it, these companies would be history (no wonder they're pivotal in JS standards committees and JS standardization).

JavaScript developers are fully aware of this but they keep quite mum about it because it pays their bread and butter (shame there's SFA ethics involved here, isn't it?).

Unfortunately, JavaScript's key problem is that as a language it's just too powerful and it's this power that enables big tech and others to invade users' machines, steal their data, profile their machines, etc etc. BTW, if you still think that doing this is actually acceptable then read the UK Parliament's just-published report on the matter of Facebook et al (link is below).

Until most states enact punitive laws and regulations to reign in big tech and rampant privacy-killing ads, and or the present version of JavaScript is replaced with a much more privacy-friendly user-centric version, then it seems to me the only alternative is not to run JS at all—and that's what I've practiced for years.

What's desperately needed is a 'plug-in' that replaces current JavaScript engines in browsers with ones that take control away from the server side (big tech, etc.) and then hands it over to users. JavaScript engine replacements built along these lines would effectively allow users to tell website whatever they would want websites and trackers to know. For example, users could then feed websites and trackers with randomized junk; but that's just the beginning, the possibilities are almost endless.

One problem I foresee is that we may need governments to legislate to force Big Tech to allow JS engine replacements (in browsers such as Chrome, etc.). Irrespective, the current situation where we users are being continually 'raped' from server-side cannot continue as is.

Seems to me we need a crowd-funded campaign along such lines now.

UK Parliament Report on Big Tech (Facebook et al): [https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees- a-z...](https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons- select/digital-culture-media-and-sport-committee/news/fake-news-report- published-17-19/)</comment>


Java vs F# - <AUTHOR> http://fsharpnews.blogspot.com/2010/05/java-vs-f.html <comment><USER2> All he did was compare a specific instance where Java's type erasure lead to bad performance. As one commenter has said, using a hashtable specialised for primitives would yield much better results.

Then he cherry picks some examples from the language speed shoot-out, in which Java beats F# in speed in 6/8 of the challenges.

<comment><USER3> The problem with the shoot-out it that it tests mono, right? I have not jet seen good CLR vs JVM benchmarks of the same code and algorithm (C#/Java would work well). Does anybody has any pointer.

It would be good marketing of Microsoft to show that the CLR is faster then the JVM for some typical benchmarks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Don't be turned of by the titel to much. Its not standard language bashing (but the auther clearly has a very strong opinion).

Its basiclly about the fact that some programmes really get value out of value types. It is true that the JVM lacks some features that would be nice to have to (Value-Types, real generics, tail calls).

The articly by Cliff Click is much more intressting, you should read it (and alot of his other stuff too).

Btw. Cliff says: "A real C# expert should chime in here, I'm not able to give C# a fair treatment.". So attacking him on saying wrong things about .NET stuff is not fair.</comment>


Open format - <AUTHOR> http://ihumanable.com/blog/2010/02/open-format/

<comment><USER2> What's your optimal data format/API choice? Mines json for ease of use. Gzipping this format should minimize transmit times. Is there a simple abstraction for gzipped json?</comment>


I Need Monitoring Software for Kids - <AUTHOR> My daughter hangs online all the time. I work nearly 24/7 and can't control her on a smartphone all the time. Could anyone please offer me any kind of monitoring software to prevent her from wasting time online and coming across unchildish websites? <comment><USER2> Kids on the Internet is a major problem all parents face today. But don't worry, there's always a solution. I have two daughters. They hang online all day round too. Chatting, watching videos, posting videos, photos etc. I've read a lot about how other parents handle that. Most of them use parental control software. It allows monitoring kids' activities and block some of them. I'm using Pumpic app ([http://pumpic.com/](http://pumpic.com/)) and very glad with how it works. It has everything I need to prevent my girls from wasting time and if online spend it usefully. There are many useful features in the app to see everything what's going on kids' mobile phone remotely. So you will be able to control your girl from work or wherever you are. There are many other similar apps (curbi, parent kit, txtwatcher etc.), but if choosing one of them, you'd better read about them on their websites. Personally I'm satisfied with Pumpic. Many friends of mine use it too and I didn't hear them complaining about it.

</comment><comment><USER3> > I need monitoring software for dads. My dad works all the time. He works > nearly 24/7 so I hang out online all the time. Could anyone please offer me > any kind of software to prevent him waste time working so much and spend > some more time with me and my childish things?

</comment><comment><USER4> check out open dns for your local wifi network.</comment>


Windows 10 switchover will cost Linux champion Munich €50m - <AUTHOR> https://www.techrepublic.com/article/windows-10-switchover-will-cost-linux-champion-munich-50m/?ftag=COS-05-10aaa0g&utm_campaign=trueAnthem%3A%20Trending%20Content&utm_content=5a14ac6f00bd470007dd3c20&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter <comment><USER2> That's not at all what it says. The cost of moving to Windows and office is ~€5 million:

>€ 4.8 million and licenses (for Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, software distribution,

The €50 is for hardware replacements that were going to happen anyway.

Nothing in the article addresses the harder to track costs of user efficiency and expert support staff. I'm not claiming it's cheaper in either direction, but staffing costs are a very, very real cost.

<comment><USER3> Costs are as follow:

        - 14   Mio € for personal costs
        - 24   Mio € for consulting (not sure why that is that high?!)
        - 13,4 Mio € for it@M services (support, hardware installation, etc it@M is the it company that manages the project)
        -  4,8 Mio € for HARDWARE
        - 29,9 Mio € for Licenses (Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, software delivery, License-, Print-, and Profile Management, identity management and extension of the virtualisation environment)

(to be fair the pdf quotes that a big cost will be the investment into additional virtualisation, probably licenses)

Source: [https://www.ris- muenchen.de/RII/RII/DOK/SITZUNGSVORLAGE/4740...](https://www.ris- muenchen.de/RII/RII/DOK/SITZUNGSVORLAGE/4740966.pdf)

Somebody read over the 'and' (edit:) and to be fair it's a wierd way of expressing something that is so important in german. probably an intention.

<comment><USER4> I've worked in industry long enough to suspect that there's an excellent chance that any quoted numbers are so adjusted by whoever is most politically powerful that my intuition is to just shrug my shoulders and move on to the next article. Dishonesty is so prevalent in so many "news" articles today a person should just read things and have a little chuckle before going about their day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Meanwhile:

[https://www.itworld.com/article/2716115/operating- systems/sw...](https://www.itworld.com/article/2716115/operating- systems/switching-to-linux-saves-munich-over--11-million.html)

I'm sure Munich council's decision to switch back to Windows, despite all the costs and long-term lock-in, had nothing to do with this totally random HQ- building in Munich:

[https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-germany-moves-into-a- new-h...](https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-germany-moves-into-a-new- headquarters/)

<comment><USER6> If MS built their HQ in Munich because of that then it's an absolutely amazing deal for Munich.

Just the tax on salaries from those 1900 people working there will pay off the costs of switching to Windows in a very short time.

And as a nice bonus I'm sure that 28% of users that "have severe issues related to software, which could be solved by migrating these users to Windows and MS Office."[0] will also be happy.

[0]: [https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2017/02/14/statemen...](https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2017/02/14/statement- by-the-document-foundation-about-the-upcoming-discussion-at-the-city-of- munich-to-step-back-to-windows-and-ms-office/)

<comment><USER7> Most of that tax money would not go to the city level government though.

<comment><USER8> 15% of tax revenue ends up at the municipality to be exact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > ...will also reduce costs by not having to run a Windows and LiMux client > side-by-side.

Mind that this means "reduce costs in comparison to moving to another non- Windows OS". They still do not have a cost calculation that would promise long-term savings and I'd call it unlikely at least that there will be savings, as the previous city mayor reported huge savings after the migration to LiMux.

</comment><comment><USER10> The article didn't mention what the yearly Windows licensing costs would be after the transition. I remember that the elimination of such costs was an argument for the transition in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER11> I wonder how they plan to disable the spyware? Even the enterprise edition doesn't allow turning everything off.

My employer is still rocking Windows 7 for this reason.

At one point we trialed Windows Phone, the guide was a series of embarassing turn this feature off, turn that frature off to try to limit the amount of data being syphoned. Now we use iPhones.

<comment><USER12> Win10 LTSB is free of the crapware.

<comment><USER13> Ostensibly. Given the nigh-malware-like tactics that W10 uses to work around those who try to disable some of that behavior, I'd be quite surprised if it was completely clean.

And if that fails, it's till s a massive blob of closed source proprietary code at the end of the day. Your single option is to trust Microsoft.

<comment><USER14> > I'd be quite surprised if it was completely clean.

I understood that LTSB was intended specifically for semi-critical/continous usage applications, like airport kiosks and the like.

To me, it would seem a bit irresposible to pollute LTSB with telemetry and cruft, when Microsoft knows full well that businesses bought that distribution for that specific guarantee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think Microsoft must have a very powerful lobby tackling this potential "end of an era" event.

With more companies moving analytics from Excel to Python, other data science tools, cloud or not... And governments adopting ODF as document standards. Not to mention the free beer.

<comment><USER16> Python works for data scientists, but the people who use Excel are not all data scientists. Python and Excel are as comparable as apples and oranges. They're both fruit, but that's literally all they have in common.

<comment><USER17> People are looking for something better than Excel though, particularly for teams. Raw python won't work, it would be a chaos of copy pasted receipes and voodoo... VBA is bad enough.

The spreadsheet model could be leveraged, but without free form tables and formula repetition. I'm torn about whether allowing explicit recursion or iteration is a good idea. It would have to include a visionary visual debugger.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If they want to reduce costs, they should fight against the 20% still running windows. Etherogeneity is a huge liability.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think it should all be web based with some random thin clients.

<comment><USER9> That is what they're wanting to move to. They asked the Microsoft partner Accenture, who could sell a lot of Windows clients here, to evaluate their IT situation and not even they dared to throw their reputation away and somehow suggest that Windows is a necessity. They also just suggested a thin-client architecture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> They should just get office 365 and use the online version of word Excel and PowerPoint in chromium. That's better than libre office and they won't need to switch to windows 10.

<comment><AUTHOR> They'd still produce documents in proprietary software, which is one of the reasons they migrated the first time.

A government should not set itself up in a way that requires software from a specific vendor to interact with it.

<comment><USER21> The software is proprietary, but the actual files use a variant of an open ISO/IEC/ECMA standard.[1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML)

<comment> vertex-four IIRC, it is essentially impossible to correctly implement parts of OOXML without reverse-engineering the Office suite. The standard does not provide enough information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've always found it suspicious that they essentially ended up with their own Distro.

<comment><USER12> That's how it works in Desktop Linux. The system is such a hodgepodge of interconnected pieces, each with their own slight variations in operation, configuration, and quirks, that once you finally put something together that works to your tastes you pretty much have to create your own distribution to keep it that way.

<comment><USER23> ...or you can just contract Red Hat or SUSE (which used to be a German company) to standardize on RHEL/SLED plus some customizations. They would be a pretty big customer with a good perspective to add other municipalities and branches of government in the case of success.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Astonishing, how politicians always manage to be such efficient disgust generators.

OTOH, has nobody written an Atom-based Windows emulator yet that runs in a Docker container?

</comment><comment><USER25> This seems semi-reasonable over 29000 systems.

The reality is enterprise support for linux systems is the one variable i don't really see discussed here. This is Microsoft's bread and butter for a reason. Organizations prefer an easy upfront cost rather than complex, support intensive solutions.

<comment><USER26> I'm not sure the level of support needed for Windows systems is much different to that of Linux. There will be an associated cost in both cases.

<comment><USER27> Also, I'd argue that IT support for linux is much easier to provide (and therefore, _should_ be cheaper, I can't say whether it is or not).

<comment><USER28> I think that the main problem when it comes to Linux support is that people who really understand Linux/UNIX have an easier time finding better paying positions. Lower paid IT workers tend to hang around the MS ecosystem. This shows up in the cost of maintenance for Linux solutions.

<comment><USER29> I think so. Hiring half decent Linux support staff would be a nightmare.

Window support staff are cheap and abundant. Not to mention the off the shelf outsourcing providers. IT in most large organizations already happens in India.

Love Linux and use it as my main desktop. Supporting corporate wide? Big no.

<comment><USER30> AFAIK Accenture engineers were handling linux administration of Munich municipality so recruiting admins was not the issue.

<comment><USER31> It's funny, I read: "AFAIK Accenture engineers were handling linux administration of Munich municipality" as confirmation that hiring half- competent team of Linux admins is difficult. But I confess to being biased to the corners of Accenture that I've been previously exposed to...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> > ... a full rollout of Microsoft Office 2016 ... one report suggesting the > combined cost with the Windows migration could be higher than €100m.

Yikes!

Wasn't the the migration _away from_ Windows something like €30m?

</comment><comment><USER33> It's not about money. If it cost twice that to move to Macs I think people would be celebrating.

</comment><comment><USER34> _> Today the CSU political party, which has a long track record of opposition to LiMux, is also part of the ruling coalition in Munich. It was this coalition of CSU and SPD politicians that put forward the proposals to switch back to Windows 10 earlier this year._

How do you say "pork" in German?

<comment><USER35> Schweinefleisch

<comment><USER36> I think he was referring to this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_barrel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_barrel)

<comment><USER37> So _Kirchturmpolitik_ (based on Wikipedia's linked German article).

<comment><USER38> Literally "church tower politics"—a beautiful reflection of the different focus between European concerns and US concerns historically....

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> And the productivity will increase 1000%, worth it.</comment>


Ask HN: What attracts you to an engineering role? - <AUTHOR> We're in the process of iterating our engineering jobs pages, the way we describe our roles, and the way we describe the company as a whole, and we want to make sure it appeals to the right people.<p>- When reading about a potential software engineering role and company, what attracts you and makes you more likely to apply?<p>- What concerns do you have about companies you haven't heard of before that might prevent you from applying?<p>- What else might persuade to apply (or dissuade you from it)? Description of the interview process? Detail on the company culture and values? <comment><USER2> The #1 problem is bullshit.

People that go through a huge amount of effort to "hire the best" and then they buy either a bright and shiny mac laptop or a cheap and cruddy dell laptop, and then they blame you for complaining that the build takes 50 minutes, etc...

You can't be a "10x" developer if there is ANY bullshit in the job.

<comment><USER3> Can't support this enough. Management bullshit. Appoint an engineer who has developed some empathy and START TRUSTING HIM. If you're not an engineer you will very like fuck this up. Getting someone to give you the right words for recruitment doesn't translate into understanding what drives an engineer.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am an engineer, but I realise that what matters to me will be different to what matters to many others. The point about empathy is an interesting one though - might try and highlight the empathy we have in the company, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As an orphan from the semiconductor industry, proficient with hardware, assembly, firmware, and light software coding I think prospective employers neglect seemingly non-qualified engineers that might answer phones or work in receiving while updating specific skills that engineering needs but is disconnected with HR who filters prospects with a laser focus to ensure immediate productivity.

We need to recycle great engineers who are unable to predict the exact programming skills that would lead to NEAR term employment.

How can we address the lack of a domestic engineering ecosystem?

</comment><comment><USER5> Instant turnoffs:

\- Boasts of "epic" nerf gun (and/or laser tag) battles, foosball tables, office kegs, or other non- or anti-perks;

\- Group selfies of your whole team wearing brightly colored T-shirts and forced smiles at some company outing. What is this, day camp?

\- Mandatory linked-in profiles and / mug shots on the company website. Where did this trend come from? What happened to privacy?

\- Tightly-packed open plan offices

\- "unlimited vacation"

<comment><AUTHOR> Can I ask your opinion on these in a bit more detail?

\- non-perks: we mention that we hang out on Friday evenings and sometimes have a drink, and we celebrate when we do important things, is this too much? Are there better ways of writing that?

\- Interesting point, I see what you mean, and we do have a team photo (no matching t-shirts). Will think about this.

\- Profiles: We want to link for those who want it, which currently happens to be the whole team - how do you suggest we convey that those are optional?

\- Office: This is a tricky one, the open-plan office is currently under discussion among the team, although we aren't that tightly packed.

\- Unlimited vacation: I think we might just not mention this one. We do have unlimited vacation, but the founders set a very good example, and it's used much more as a 'flexible' vacation policy. I think we can explain how it gets used, but maybe not on first read of a hiring page. What do you think?

<comment><USER3> I don't see how the discussion around an open plan office is tricky. Simply googling it will give you droves of articles like this one

[http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/why-your-company-will- bene...](http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/why-your-company-will-benefit-from- getting-rid-of-open-office-spaces-first-90.html)

as well as research such as this review of research on the topic:

[http://www.lapa.co.nz/assets/NewsAttachments/openplanoffices...](http://www.lapa.co.nz/assets/NewsAttachments/openplanofficeszengine.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> I've read a lot of these things, and while I recognise there is some research in favour of private offices, I also think it's currently very 'trendy' to say that open spaces are bad, and I think a lot of the discussion is very developer-focused. Most of the people in our office are non-developers, and while the developers like quiet, our creative teams get far more enjoyment (and seemingly productivity) as a result of being able to talk and bounce ideas off each other much more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Do you have experienced engineers/developers who can mentor junior employees?

<comment><AUTHOR> That would be a really good selling point, thanks for mentioning it, but we're not looking for _really_ junior developers at the moment. That said, we would be a good place for mentoring on launching a startup, so we might mention that.</comment></comment>


An un-edited view of Saturn - <AUTHOR> https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2019/05/20/an-un-edited-view-of-saturn/ <comment><USER3> > Instead they are compressed with Kris Becker's implementation of Huffman > encoding. Thankfully the source to the compression, and various manipulation > tools are included in both C & Fortran.

As someone who often helps a spouse decode various police car/bodycams and random retail surveillance formats for court work, that always comes on DVDs, this makes me so jealous.

Imagine... having the source code to decode the image or video format right on the CD. In a portable C format.

And not having to install Windows XP to support whatever proprietary DRM'ed software that no longer has a support page on the internet, after 2hrs trying to get it working in a Windows 10 VM? Then leaving the whole OS VM installed on your laptop because you couldn't be bothered to do it twice...

I wish the local police hired NASA people to set up their systems.

<comment><USER4> Oh VICAR is not so strange. There was this "weird" habit back then that the file formats (IMG astronomical format does this too) would start with an ASCII-based fixed length header (or the header is variable size, but has a line of text at the start that states the size). Always a multiple of 512 or 1024 bytes too. And then in the header you can literally read (with your human eyes) the format used, how many bits per pixel, the lines width and how many lines and so own.

You can literally write a parser from reading a couple of headers. Of course, it's much better to be provided with software that can handle all the nuisances of the format without having to test it when something fails on you.

<comment><USER5> Sounds a bit like NetPBM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I find the idea of "the planets as they would appear if you were really there" very appealing and have thought about it for years. But "un-edited raw imagery" is just the beginning - surely you can't rely on the unadjusted data having the frequency response of the human eye any more than the heavily massaged pictures one usually sees. It seems like a major project that would take significant expertise to try to reproduce what the human eye would see up close.

<comment><USER7> I really like the idea of raw unedited data. The closer we get to captured scientific data the better the feeling of exploring the planet in real life is for me. The whole artistic spirit of realism leaves me a bit flat because it ends up being like Jurassic park dinosaurs - the missing parts filled in with frog DNA and jacked up for theme park amusement. Colours blown out, infinite camera perspectives, musical stings and character plot or gamified systems of interaction.

Exploring raw data is closer to participating in electronic discovery than exploring an artists attempt at making a huge empty planet palatable to the spending consumer.

<comment><USER8> Depends on what you mean with "raw data", the pictures shown in the post are clearly calibrated data: you can tell because there isn't a lot of noise and other camera artefacts.

Here is an nice example showing how WISE (W3) images go from _real_ raw data to science calibrated images: [http://wise2.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/release/allsky/expsup/fig...](http://wise2.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/release/allsky/expsup/figures/sec4_4af3.jpg) (taken from [http://wise2.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/release/allsky/expsup/sec...](http://wise2.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/release/allsky/expsup/sec4_4a.html))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For an even more primal experience, it's worth looking at Saturn with your own eye through a telescope. An 8" reflector is fine. Even though it is obviously nothing like these photos, it is surreal to see that object up in the sky.

<comment><USER10> I had that experience at a charity stargazing night here in Houston not long ago. It's really something!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How discrete are the rings of Saturn? Do they look continuous due to the long exposure time of a photograph? Would they look more like an asteroid belt if we could increase the shutter speed?

<comment><USER12> Discrete enough to have names of their subdivisions-

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rings_of_Saturn#Subdivisions_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rings_of_Saturn#Subdivisions_and_structures_within_the_rings)

<comment><USER11> Those are gaps between rings. I'm asking about the rings themselves - <USER2> they look more like dotted lines?

<comment><USER12> >> They consist of countless small particles, ranging in size from micrometers to meters

>> The densest parts of the Saturnian ring system are the A and B Rings,

I don't see anything that says exactly how dense the rings are, though...

<comment><USER13> I think that when you're close enough to resolve a meter-sized (car-sized) object, the ring would look like a straight band to you. From where you can see the rings curved, you must see them as "solid".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Two days days ago this was on apod: [https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap200419.html](https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap200419.html)

<comment><USER15> I really miss having a working APOD official iOS app. The others just don't appeal to me.

That video is gorgeous. "That' no moon!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> PDS Atlas is the best place to get this data: [https://pds- imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/search/](https://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/search/) and USGS ISIS is the software to work with it: [https://github.com/USGS- Astrogeology/ISIS3](https://github.com/USGS-Astrogeology/ISIS3)

<comment><USER8> This is where I end up if I start at the planetary data archive, these are the raw images for Saturn: [https://pds- imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/volumes/voyager.html](https://pds- imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/volumes/voyager.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The touching up of photos by NASA is really interesting - I don't want to fuel all of the mars conspiracies but undeniable that a lot of stuff in the mars photos is obviously airbrushed and there has been a transition from everything on mars being red hued to blue sky with lots of greys and browns in the landscape, it shows that NASA has taken a lot of artistic license. The Viking probes all had color calibration plates attached, so I'm pretty sure someone made the decision to tint the photos because "the public expected the red planet to be red", then someone else made a different decision, so slowly the red hue is being replaced with natural colors just to save face.

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't really know anything about astronomy, but I noticed a planet at dawn and looked it up: Jupiter! Saturn and Mars are also super visible in the same part of the sky about an hour before sunrise. Pluto is lined up too but obviously not visible. Have a look!

SkyView was an app recommended to me, but it would be cool to have something a little more scientific. What's a nerdier app I can't try?

<comment><USER19> You could try Stellarium: [https://stellarium.org/](https://stellarium.org/)

It has many features and takes quite a bit of exploring.

<comment><USER18> Love it, thanks! Specifically:

[https://stellarium-web.org/](https://stellarium-web.org/)

Sky View is nice but it's a bit noddy: I couldn't get it to break down the four big moons of Jupiter, which are so clearly visible, but I didn't know which was which!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > like all old CD-ROM's they are not quite 'ISO CD9660' enough so they don't > mount on Windows 10, or OS X.

Not sure what the issue was here, I was able to mount the file just fine on my Windows 10 machine

<comment><USER21> Are you using daemon tools or something else 3rd party?

I couldn't get them to mount on Windows 10, I ended up using MS-DOS to mount them. I've had this issue with a number of early 90's CD-ROM's that apparently violate the spec, including Microsoft Bookshelf

[https://archive.org/details/MicrosoftBookshelf1991](https://archive.org/details/MicrosoftBookshelf1991)

<comment><USER20> No, I just changed the extension to ISO and double clicked, using the native ISO mounting functionality.

Can't test with MS bookshelf as there doesn't appear to be an ISO provided

EDIT: Nonetheless thank you for preparing these interesting images!

<comment><USER21> Maybe it's been some update or something, it sure didn't work when I tried this a year ago.

I ripped the CD of bookshelf as a MDF

[https://archive.org/download/MicrosoftBookshelf1991/msbooksh...](https://archive.org/download/MicrosoftBookshelf1991/msbookshelf91_mdf.zip)

Since it wasn't mounting for me either with the physical disc, or the image... I passed the drive under Qemu and MS-DOS read it fine.

The whole thing was... Strange in that I can't get these old discs to mount. Although they read fine. strange.

It was really fun taking these old CD-ROM's disc images, and actually manipulating the data. I didn't expect to get anything and I was really surprised that it worked.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


SourMint Malicious SDK - <AUTHOR> https://snyk.io/research/sour-mint-malicious-sdk/ <comment><USER3> _> Mintegral SDK uses a technique called method swizzling to replace implementations of the UIApplication openURL and SKStoreProductViewController loadProductWithParameters methods at runtime, as well it registers a custom NSURLProtocol class._

That's really clever. It looks like it uses ObjC dynamic linking to swap out calls[0].

When I read stuff like this, I'm glad that I'm a "dependency curmudgeon."

I'm not sure I would have figured this out, if I had vetted the dependency (Actually, I'm pretty sure I would have missed it).

I'm wondering if Apple would be able to detect this behavior, in their review process. There are certainly legitimate uses for it, but I like to avoid these types of hacks, in my shipping apps.

[0] [https://nshipster.com/method-swizzling/](https://nshipster.com/method- swizzling/)

<comment><USER4> Method swizzling has been well known and used for as long as Objective C has been around. It's essentially Objective C's flavor of what other dynamic languages call monkey patching. I'm surprised that the App store review process didn't catch this, especially if the SDK was used by 1200 apps on the app store.

It reminds of something I'd done to get past the App store review a long time ago. This was when the iPad had just come out and UISplitViewController was super buggy. I found that the only way to get the universal app I was building to work satisfactorily on both the iPad and the iPhone was to use one of their undocumented methods. We submitted the app for review and as I'd half expected, it was rejected for using an undocumented API. The work around was to rot-13 the selector for the undocumented method and to decode it at runtime, dynamically call the method with performSelector. That made it pass the review. And that's when I learnt that the reviewers were probably just running strings (the unix program) and grep to find apps using undocumented APIs. That was a long time ago, I hope things have gotten better by now. :)

<comment><USER5> > _That was a long time ago, I hope things have gotten better by now. :)_

Reviewer techniques of course improve somewhat and evolve over time, but in terms of basic heavy reliance on automation and the like it's doubtful much has changed. But that's ok, because the battle is about economics and layers not perfection. The final layer is what HN has been so up in arms about: eventual detection after the fact, at which point Apple bans the devs and in extreme instances can revoke certs/delete the malware in question (all while its harm is limited by sandboxing/trust chains/etc). The $100/yr wall layer stops some automated attacking and makes anonymity more difficult, the signing requirements make it harder to avoid specific attribution, the restrictive permissions model and such stop some attacks, the review process maybe catches a few more and certain softer attacks, all of which combined hopefully reduces the final volume of what gets through and the value of what can be achieved with it vs consequences to a level where post-hoc response (the most expensive kind) can keep up. And the single market means the process is hard to avoid entirely, and the interests of users can collectively push back on the power of developers.

So no silver bullets, each layer has a part to play. That's kind of expected though isn't it? It's the typical trade off scalability vs specificity.

<comment><USER6> 1200 "compromised" apps in appstore for more than 6 months (I can't find when 5.5.1 of the sdk was released, it was before 3 March), and you really want to spin this as a "success" of the enlightened-dictator model...?

<comment><USER5> It's astonishing in this day and age to see people like you who still think it statistically appropriate to toss out absolute numbers for comparative systems. As I wrote the expectation is not perfection but improving the economic balance, since _all_ general security is an economic game. That 1200 number is utterly meaningless by itself, the comparison is what the numbers would be, what the compromise can accomplish on the system, and for how long, _without_ any of these measures in place. A major goal of iOS is to allow the general population to go browse around and install absolutely anything they like the look of with minimal concern for what it might do. And it's a good goal, sacrilegious as it's proved to be amongst techies, even if unfortunately (though unsurprisingly) Apple has brought along unnecessary baggage with it. We should and could have done better first and preempted it, but collectively could not be bothered (or even outright mocked victims).

I'm not going to bother with rhetorical questions about the state of such things on Windows, macOS, Linux or whatever because we all damn well know the answer.

<comment><USER6> Ah yes, "think of the children", that marvel of rhetorical tools. You deny others their freedom, but it's "for the greater good". That always ends up _so_ well.

The "state of such things" on other platforms, as dangerous as it might look to your paternalistic worldview, is what enabled the PC revolution in the first place. Had Microsoft or IBM enacted policies as draconian and illiberal as Apple is doing now, we likely wouldn't be talking on a free tcp connection using free browsers, right now. It's not by denying people their freedom that you reach progress and stability, but by educating them to make better choices for themselves.

But sure, spin it round and round. You and Apple are doing your best to keep back progress, but it's not going to last.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If we all agreed that free apps (and services) come at a real cost either in data or subversive practices. Then started paying money for apps that provide value. Do we think this sort of stuff would stop?

<comment><USER8> No, of course not. The best example is the hugely expensive big TV screen that still comes with all of this, and there isn't even any particular service it offers.

<comment><USER9> Are these "smart" TVs compliant with the GDPR, and if so, how?

<comment><USER6> The same way polluting industries just dump their shit around: nobody sues them until it's incredibly egregious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is very typical of mobile adware/malware to avoid triggering detection by the Apple App Store or Google play store.

Sometimes when looking for signs of malware the easiest thing to observe is either it's use of Persistance or its checks for root/jailbreak rather than the malicious code itself.

I know there are many legitimate reasons for an app to obfuscate its code or to check if the device is rooted or running through a MITM proxy (such as banking apps for example) but I would think that if an app were submitted with these checks it should get flagged for further review at least.

<comment><USER11> > I know there are many legitimate reasons for an app to obfuscate its code or > to check if the device is rooted or running through a MITM proxy (such as > banking apps for example)

There's an argument to be made that even those aren't legitimate, since you can do online banking from a desktop computer where you have root. I'd be in favor of app stores banning root checks from apps that don't need root.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So glad the App Store prevents malware.

<comment><USER13> It certainly helps.

If a heavily sandboxed, walled-garden App Store is still vulnerable on its smaller attack surface, then the open-for-all alternative will be absolutely plagued.

What is the point you're trying to make?

<comment><USER9> Counterintuitively, the walled garden may make the problem worse.

The App Store is a single target. It makes "discovery" easier for malware. Imagine if these apps had to get users the "old fashioned" way, one-by-one, word-of-mouth, etc. It also requires less initial setup for malware developers, as opposed to having to develop their own software distribution infrastructure. Every claim about the App Store making things easier for developers also applies to malware.

Moreover, the App Store race to the bottom undermined the previous paid upfront software model in favor of everything being free, supported either by ads or by "cash cow" manipulative IAP.

<comment><USER14> > Moreover, the App Store race to the bottom undermined the previous paid > upfront software model in favor of everything being free, supported either > by ads or by "cash cow" manipulative IAP.

Microtransactions were a thing even before the App Store race - <USER2> Farmville, MafiaWars and the other host of Zynga's Facebook games?

<comment><USER9> I didn't say microtransactions weren't a thing. But clearly the App Store vastly expanded these practices.

Pointing to Facebook just proves the point. Facebook is a walled garden, but does anyone think Facebook is a "healthy software ecosystem" for developers and users?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Mintegral SDK uses a technique called method swizzling to replace > implementations of the UIApplication openURL and > SKStoreProductViewController loadProductWithParameters methods at runtime

Naive swizzling of system API's will be detected/stopped by App Review, right? Or perhaps only if it's private methods?

<comment><USER16> I've been looking but haven't found a good systematic way to review code to find this. In the case of Mintegral, there were a number of obfuscations to make it difficult to recognize. Swizzling, while a bad practice in general, can be done for legitimate reasons. So you need to be able to detect what method they're looking up with _method_getImplementation and changing with _method_setImplementation which is the part that can be difficult. So far, I've found one old project in GitHub from 2016 that was designed to do this. However it's stale and I haven't had a chance to review it yet to see how effective it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I feel like it's been accepted wisdom for a long time that native apps are more secure than the web. In the last few months I've found myself wondering if that's actually true. They both have their own, different security problems.

<comment><USER16> The challenge here is with SDKs, just like with other open source libraries and packages, once you introduce someone else's code into your app, it becomes infinitely harder to get visibility into what your app is doing and ensure that third-party code isn't doing something nefarious (or including a sub- dependency that does something nefarious).

<comment><USER17> True, but at least on the web I can inspect what network requests it sends, what the code is (even if it's obfuscated). Native SDKs are just a black hole.</comment></comment></comment>


My Setup - <AUTHOR> http://paulstamatiou.com/my-setup

<comment><USER2> These posts are all meaningless drivel.

Does anyone really care what chair someone sits on? Whether they use a MacBook Air or a MacBook Pro? Yes, you use 1Password. We get it.</comment>


The Basecamp outage / slowdown today - <AUTHOR> http://productblog.37signals.com/products/2009/11/the-basecamp-outage-slowdown-today.html

<comment><USER2> That would seem to be a fairly deep architectural flaw. Namely, that (roughly speaking) all users of the basecamp server experience performance and reliability roughly equal to that of those users experiencing the worst performance and reliability at any given moment. The guys who depend on the service for $2^N value per day are in the same boat as those who depend on it as those who depend on it for $2^(N-K) value. Each group that depends on it for $2^N value CAN NOT differentiate themselves, reliability, from their competitors who also rely on it for $2^N value.

That's old news, really. It's well known that that's a problem with SaS, centralization, and applications without competition. It's well known that it would be fixed by letting basecamp users install and run the system on servers under their own control with full software freedom over the thing (trading, probably, a little bit less reliability for each customer against faster recoveries for most and no "global outages" and the ability to invest in hardening the infrastructure for a competitive advantage).... it's just interesting to see those theoretical defects confirmed in practice.

<comment><USER3> That doesn't really fix the issue though... Sure, you won't have "global outages," but I would bet that the overall amount of downtime would be significantly larger when installed on private servers and not centralized and managed by 37signals.

I doubt that recoveries would be faster anyway.

<comment><USER2> Recoveries would (likely, for now - less likely a few years from now) be more often necessary and slower for most users all else being equal, but it's not that simple.

First, if users have software freedom and are running the system on servers under their own control, they are free to spend as much as they like, exactly how they like, to improve reliability. That's the main point of $2^N analysis: if Alice's Transnational Inc. stands to lose up to $500K on a given day if the service is out, she can buy insurance in terms of back-up servers (and her back-up servers only need to serve her users, not every user of the software, anywhere). Alice is not limited to the same QoS as Bob's Main St. Paint Store. 37signals has to optimize its present and future profitability - not Alice's value received. There's a misalignment of incentives, there.

Second, if the software were free and generally deployed in a distributed, decentralized fashion, it's architecture could evolve to be more of a P2P system such that many different servers would all have to go down at once to cause more than a slight inconvenience and performance degradation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why don't they just come clean and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused me?

Edit: Sorry, I know HN doesn't encourage one-liners and jokes, but I couldn't resist this one... I guess you had to be at Startup School to appreciate it.

<comment><USER5> "Once again, we're really sorry for this. It was very painful to watch Basecamp be unavailable or slow for that long when we knew what we had to do to prevent this in the future. Please accept our apologies. Thanks for being a Basecamp customer."

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What caches are they referring to? DB caches? Anyone know what tools they may be referring to?

<comment><USER7> Looks like DB caches indeed.

<comment><USER6> I wouldn't think that most of the queries are executed that often, given that the "sites" are so unique.

I'd be curious to hear more about how they utilize caching.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why is this news?

<comment><USER9> It isn't. However, it takes only 11 of HN's multitudes of users to decide that they thought it was interesting, and upvote it, to put it on the front page.</comment></comment>


Superfans: A Love Story – Is fandom becoming as toxic as politics? - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/16/superfans-a-love-story <comment><USER2> To a very large degree politics is fandom in the U.S. Most everyone here is either a fan of the "Red" or "Blue" team.

This is something we all grow up with here. By the time we're adults it's deeply ingrained in our behavior.</comment>