GIF site Gfycat announces mass deletions, threatens Archive Team with lawsuit - <AUTHOR> https://boingboing.net/2019/11/08/gif-site-gfycat-announces-mass.html <comment><USER2> I've been on several sides of this type of situation.

As a content provider, what makes large-scale hosting possible is in large part the fact that access follows a very strong power distribution (Zipf's Law), with a minuscule fraction of content accounting for the vast majority of traffic. Front that on your CDN and the backing store is only occasionally accessed as cache expires or something becomes Teh New Hawtness.

Meme-hosting services are particularly suitable for this, for some reason....

When an archive project starts, suddenly assumptions on which design, service, and provisioning decisions have been made fly out the window as _everything_ becomes popular. It's a bit like the proverbial monkey trap -- there's only so much that can squeeze out through the pipe at once.

[https://coaching-journey.com/coaching-story-monkey-trap/](https://coaching- journey.com/coaching-story-monkey-trap/)

And yes, such attempts can very much look like a DDoS to site engineers and ops teams.

As an archivist, it's immensely frustrating to get scant, no, or rapidly- changing reports of content culls or service EOLs. Gfycat's problem here is somewhat self-inflicted as the window for deletion is so short. ArchiveTeam's efforts would have far less effect if spread over more time.

As user of online services, finding my own content, and interactions with others, suddenly missing (and having to figure out how to fix such issues as broken image links) is immensely frustrating.

Or, conversely, there's the wish for content posted years ago to simply die an honorable death. The fact that many services (HN among them) _don 't_ provide a reasonable way to delete old content is problematic.

The fact that Gfycat have immediately jumped to threat of lawsuits, and don't appear to be talking with Jason Scott on Twitter, increases tensions and disappointment levels. Being reasonable, understanding, and human makes much of life vastly more tolerable.

</comment><comment><USER3> On a somewhat related topic, I noticed massive amounts of gifs that I would typically discover through Android's keyboard option (hooked up to Giphy I believe) were deleted sometime last year (tons of content, even obscure stuff, related to pop culture and movies, even DBZ abridged stuff). I was not sure if this was done by the website hosting these gifs or the users themselves but it was such a large number across so many genres that I suspected the website scrubbed them for whatever reason (also cannot be found through the main website itself).

Additionally, I've been looking for gif hosting websites and Google does not make one mention of Gfycat anywhere in their search results for keyword "gif websites", and this is after going through the first 5 pages of results, which seems a bit odd to me.

edit: I found Gfycat on the 7th page of Google search results, interesting...

</comment><comment><USER4> Good luck to them blocking any well executed, geographically distributed and well architected scraping/mirroring effort. If you're willing to ignore a robots.txt file and do whatever is necessary to mirror content from publicly accessible http daemons on the internet, there's a lot of ways to do it.

It sounds like the initial effort from archive team was a bit too concentrated and strained server resources.

<comment><USER5> They have 10 days before the deletion takes place.

"On Nov 18, we are planning on permanently removing anonymous content that meets the following criteria: 1) less than 200 views, 2) older than one year, and 3) anonymous (made w/o an account)"

[https://twitter.com/GfycatHelp/status/1191770073259577344?s=...](https://twitter.com/GfycatHelp/status/1191770073259577344?s=20)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1192518085997137920](https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1192518085997137920)

"On November 5th, @Gfycat announced they were going to delete scads of content off their site in 15 days. @archiveteam began trying to download some of the at-risk works. @gfycat has threatened to sue and is demanding compensation for the downloads. We have stopped the project."

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't think I've ever seen anything on Gyycat that was actually uploaded by or with the permission of the copyright holder.

</comment><comment><USER8> I can understand the motivation to archive the content about to get deleted (although I'm skeptical of the idea it has any value), but it sounds like they basically took no consideration of whether their archive effort would flood the site they're archiving. I think it's fair for Gfycat to be pissed off about suddenly being flooded, it's not worth a lawsuit though. Having said that, the content and website belongs to gfycat and they can choose who they serve that content to.

<comment><USER9> They definitely did. They said they did contact Gfycat and they said that they would extend the deadline a bit. They took that as them being okay with the archive and went fully forward at the speed to be able to get the archive done in the amount of time left.

See [https://dd.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/dt3aom/archive_...](https://dd.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/dt3aom/archive_team_gfycat_has_threatened_to_sue_and_is/)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Custom Fonts & Anti-Aliasing - <AUTHOR>

So I've got a question for everyone: what's with the current fascination with using imported fonts that (on certain OS's/browsers), don't have AA. I love good typography as much as the next geek, but is it really so important to have that flashy font that you used in Photoshop, if it looks rubbish on your site for a large number of users?<p>@Developers: What's your take on using these fonts against using normal ones?<p>@Designers: Would you rather have a font that's correct against initial design, or an anti-aliased one that isn't?<p>Examples: custora.com, locations on creativemornings.com, elated.com post titles. YMMV looking at these, based on what your OS/browser combo is. <comment><USER2> Whether the font is anti-aliased or not depends on the operating system settings, not on the font itself.

That said, I do notice that some custom web fonts look ugly on Windows due to the very crisp quality of the rendering engine, especially when Cleartype is enabled. Those fonts look a lot better on Linux and Mac browsers.

Therefore, whenever I choose to use a custom web font and know that my target audience includes Windows users I give more attention to selecting a proper font and testing how it renders on the page.

I encourage the use of embedded fonts over traditional techniques such as image replacement, because the text looks and behaves the same as it would in other applications on the user's computer.

(I'm a developer doing some design on the side)

<comment><USER3> Not quite, Windows uses hinting information from the font, OSX doesn't. Many freely available fonts contain terrible or no hinting, and they will look bad at small sizes on Windows.

<comment><USER4> Even more important: Windows uses _very_ aggressive hinting for its default fonts, especially the new set introduced with Office 2007 and Windows Vista (Calibri, Cambria, Consolas). Though I very much like the effect for my programming font (Consolas is great in that respect), it destroys the scalability of a font to a very high degree (this is the reason why zooming a Webpage in any Browser reflows your text, and why some fonts look different in shape and/or height/width ratio in different zoom-levels; beside that rendering-engines decision to round the font-sizes to the next full pixel).

IE9 promises to not do this anymore, and on high-density displays (the better smartphone ones) it is simply not needed.

So the problem is two-fold: a very distinctive look of Microsoft fonts, and a sub-optimal fallback for non-aggressively hinted fonts in Windows.

However, if one uses font-sizes that one can actually read (for instance, bigger then 12pt, thank you all very much) the pixel-per-character count gets big enough that the results start looking better -- especially as the user does not unconsciously move his nose to meet the display in person.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Add text-shadow: 0px 0px 1px rgba(0,0,0,.05); (Or any other text-shadow value)

This makes a huge difference in Windows Chrome as it apparently causes the font to take a different rendering path.

Don't use text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; It ends up doing either nothing or making things look worse on some mobile webkit browsers.

<comment><USER6> When using shadows on text with css you put the users CPU to test, if the users is on a mobile device or slow computer the CPU will work hard to make the shadow look good, so keep that in mind and try to avoid text shadow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> For css -webkit-font-smoothing you may try between "antialiased" and "subpixel-antialiased", then there is css text-rendering: optimizeLegibility.

Also you should notice a bug in Safari for OS X that turns off antialiasing: <http://seanmcb.com/typekit/webkit-antialiasing-test.html>

Google has free webfonts that are already prepared for including in different browsers, you may consider them: <http://www.google.com/webfonts>, also there is <http://www.kernest.com/>.

FontSquirrel was already mentioned in this thread.

<comment><USER7> Also, If you use css 3d transform in Safari or Chrome under Mac OS, then absolute or relative positioned text will be badly antialiased. To fix that you need to explicitly set background color for these elements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why? Because the system strikes a balance between good semantics (for SEO if you need to justify this commercially), expressing a design effectively and licensing typography legally for the web.

It's an improvement over Cufon/Sifr generally and the one downside it does have (rendering under non-mac) will get better soon and I'll have to do zero work to benefit from that (theoretically).

Plus I saved a lot of time (and cost for the client) getting from design to live site quickly. It's a small price to pay, given that most ppl won't care that much, and those that do, a good proportion will understand what the issue is.

<comment><USER8> On a side note as a font-lovin' designer type: I personally love it when sites break out the webfonts to great effect.

If a site is designed well then the small detail of the font AA is easily missed, ignored or forgiven as the site is a joy to use/view.

Quipsologies is a case in point. <http://www.underconsideration.com/quipsologies/>

The slight clipping of their sub-heads under chrome is overlooked given beautiful layout and clear delivery of information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> In my experience, some webfonts look okay at smaller sizes but most of them don't.

Typekit shows browser samples that you can break down by OS as well. ie. <http://typekit.com/fonts/adelle-web> click on the 'Browser Samples' tab

Look what happens when you change the h1 on custora.com from 50px just up to 51px on Chrome [Win 7]: <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4129016/50-51.png> (it looks a lot better)

<comment><USER7> Thats why I think its better to use generic font on the body copy, and custom fonts for comparatively larger headings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> You've raised a good issue.

I recently redesigned my blog and that included updating the typography. I decided on DroidSerifRegular for the body text. It looks beautiful on a Mac but when I previewed it on IE/Windows, it looked absolutely horrible (the lowercase a, especially). So for IE I use Georgia.

My blog: <http://techiferous.com>

<comment><USER9> I set the body text to DroidSerifRegular on IE7 for Win and it looks fine:

<http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4129016/droidserif-ie7-vs-chrome.png>

Also, it looks like the bottom of the "g"'s and possibly some other characters are getting cut off. It's fixed by adjusting the font-size.

<comment><USER10> Thanks! That reminds me that it was actually the lowercase t's I had an issue with, not the lowercase a's. Notice the "inkbleed" at the bottom of the t.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Custom fonts seems to have problems here and there on Chrome/Chromium. No matter how hard you try you would get mediocre fonts on Windows box.

May be chromium devs need a way to unitize ClearType when custom fonts are being used.

</comment><comment><USER12> top tip: Adding text shadow (use the background color so it's invisible) makes fonts render a lot better in Webkit. No idea why, it just does.

<comment><USER12> Also, if you're using @font-face for links, you may get some weirdness with hover states etc. You can use the same trick, but you'll need to tweak the blur for each state to get rid of any artefacts that stick around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's not about the font display it's about accessibility and usability (being able to process the text, seo, copy paste etc)

</comment><comment><USER14> Chrome on Windows has some of the ugliest web fonts in general, but I've found that including an EOT, Woff and SVG in addition to the TTF.

FontSquirrel's '@font-face Kits' execute this as perfectly as I've seen, and I can't find a scenario wherein their fonts look ugly.

<comment><USER9> I'm curious, what version of Windows? Chrome for me on XP and Windows 7 has the most beautiful webfonts out of all browsers.

The syntax from the kits at Font Squirrel are also what most other subscription/pay webfont use, so Font Squirrel fonts shouldn't necessarily be any different from Typekit fonts.

Most recent bulletproof syntax: [http://www.fontspring.com/blog/further- hardening-of-the-bull...](http://www.fontspring.com/blog/further-hardening-of- the-bulletproof-syntax)

<comment><USER15> Do you have a screenshot of good-looking webfonts on Windows?

Here is a sample image I've made comparing various font rendering engines. The "Windows" one is by far the worst, IMO, and that's Chrome: <http://twitpic.com/1ynx3e> .

Edit: I looked around on fontspring, and noticed that most of those fonts look OK on Windows/Chrome, though not as good as on Firefox with DirectWrite enabled. Does the way you embed the font affect how well it renders?

Also, I've noticed that many free fonts (like those available from Google) render poorly. Is this an artifact of them being poorly designed?

<comment><USER14> <http://twitpic.com/44qqyn>

<comment><USER15> Yeah, definitely looks better in FF4 with the new rendering APIs, or OS X. Those jaggies are pretty ugly :).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Extempore - statically typed, GC-less, JIT compiled lisp dialect - <AUTHOR> http://extempore.moso.com.au/

<comment><AUTHOR> There have been two posts about it long time ago but they went completely unnoticed:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5397123](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5397123)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5125339](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5125339)

I personally am very impressed about it. The github address is:

[https://github.com/digego/extempore](https://github.com/digego/extempore)

Documentation:

[http://benswift.me/extempore-docs/](http://benswift.me/extempore-docs/)

And according to Google Groups it seems to be active:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/extemporelang](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/extemporelang)</comment>