Keybase and Stellar is live for everyone - <AUTHOR> https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-stellar-launch <comment><USER2> I'm not convinced that association with cryptocurrency does much to give the appearance of credibility, trustworthiness and stability to keybase.io

I associate crypto with shonk, which puts keybase.io in the "this is a crypto thing? Hmmm.... shonky." category.

I guess it depends on what the corporate goals of keybase.io are - I think it was identity management or something rather being a crypto player.

edit: I should qualify that I've always seen and continue to see keybase.io as being a really reputable and stable company and not shonky. I guess I was a bit jaded by being flooded with crypto ads on every social media platform 12 months ago or so.

<comment><USER3> > I associate crypto with shonk, which puts keybase.io in the "this is a > crypto thing? Hmmm.... shonky." category.

This is unnecessary bias, though. If you look past the drama, cryptocurrency is a powerful and useful invention.

<comment><USER4> > cryptocurrency is a powerful and useful invention.

Can you explain? Intellectually interesting? No question. But powerful or useful (I consider them synonyms)? I'd like to see some actual examples.

This is genuine curiosity, not snark. I'm on the board of a blockchain startup who has a legitimate application for a blockchain -- an aspirin. But this application could have been done 20 years ago if there hadn't been patent issues for hash chains. And while the engineers are enthusiastic to do a coin nobody can explain why someone else would want to buy one, except in the hope that someone someday would pay more for it.

I've seen a few vaguely interesting applications cor crypto currencies, but they are all been at best 'vitamins'. I've yet to see an 'aspirin'.

<comment><USER5> Of course you don't understand, because you don't need them, you can't understand freedom of expression if you never had anything to say, you can't understand privacy if you never had anything to hide, if you were living in a country like mine, Argentina, you would understand immediately the incredibly useful thing that Bitcoin is.

I have a Swiss bank in my pocket, in a country that steals all your savings every ten years and the central bank destroys you with inflation.

I have an international payment system, I can send and receive money in minutes to whomever I want, without asking permission from anyone, without the government or the bank stealing it from me. From a place where it is sinful to take your money out of the country.

It's the difference between existing or not in the world, and you have no idea how incredible it is to be able to pass an Argentine crisis without your family suffering hunger, no centralized system could give me something similar at such a low cost.

<comment><USER6> It sounds like Stellar would be a bad fit for your use-case, then, even while Bitcoin is useful.

<comment><USER7> why is that? you can still interact with the stellar network with just xlm->xlm; you don't have to pass it through and anchor to pay in some fiat- backed token

<comment><USER6> Ah, OK. I've had a pretty hard time understanding Stellar's model. It seems pretty complicated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Stellar is a pretty cool platform. Here are some features:

Any node can issue tokens pretty easily. Tokens are basically IOUs and come with counterparty risk. For example you want to issue tokens for carbon emission trading, you can do that with a few lines of code but people have to trust you to redeem them for whatever they are worth at the end. The only asset that comes without counterparty risk is the native asset XLM.

It uses the Stellar consensus protocol (not proof of work) with a new ledger being closed every 3-5 seconds. SCP favors safety over liveness (no progress until consensus is reached)

Stellar has a decentralized exchange built-in in the protocol layer. That means that market orders are p2p messages and are part of consensus for each new ledger.

<comment><USER9> My biggest problem with Stellar (and Ripple, which it was forked from) is that it's a centralized blockchain. Transactions are public, but you cannot become a block-producing node (validator). This allows censorship if they do not like the person proposing transactions, or the transaction itself, and could rollback if they wanted.

I'm a much bigger fan of Cosmos and (future) PoS Ethereum, which is permissionless to become a block producer - you just need to acquire enough stake.

<comment><USER8> This is true for Ripple but not for stellar. In stellar you become part of consensus when any node adds you to their quorum slice. For example IBM runs a node, if they do business with your company they want to add you to their quorum and you are part of consensus.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I won't repost my entire comment here, but I noted in 2017 on Hacker News some pretty shady stuff going on with Stellar/XLM and their customer support team / developers.

You can read the entire account here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15935583#15936174](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15935583#15936174)

It starts with this:

\---

I was given 6000 XLM and I left it in their official wallet for years. On May 12th, 2017 I wrote them an email asking why my wallet, now converted to some newer official wallet, was empty. I did not receive a reply for 2 months, at which point I followed up and received a reply within a day, which was:

"I have investigated your account and it looks like an account merge operation occurred some time ago merging your lumens with another account. If you did not commit this action, it could be possible that someone was able to obtain your account information.

You can see the merge operation here: [https://horizon.stellar.org/accounts/GD2CPSK2E3TUNC2N5NGGQJQ...](https://horizon.stellar.org/accounts/GD2CPSK2E3TUNC2N5NGGQJQ..).

Unfortunately there is nothing we can do to retrieve your lumens at this point.

Apologies we cannot be of further help."

<comment><USER11> Yup... I was part of one of the first XLM grants. I saved my credentials and stopped paying attention until recently when I tried to go to my account. There was some sort of wallet migration needed due to a security issue, and it needed to be done years ago, so it's all just gone now.

Stellar, like the rest of the cryptocurrencies, can go die in a fire as far as I'm concerned.

<comment><USER12> So you're angry that the virtual money you got as a handout, from a system in early development, was lost four years later after you failed to act on an upgrade announced months in advance. Sounds fair.

<comment><USER13> I don't know about you, but the bank cannot arbitrarily decide that my money is gone because I didn't deign to respond to them within a certain time period.

The moment the bank starts doing that it's not a bank any more, it's a scam.

<comment><USER14> Brushing aside the "giveaway" aspect of the parent comment, banks decide that money is gone (or inaccessible) because actors didn't respond within "reasonable timeframes" pretty frequently. For example:

\- Banks are not legally obligated to honor checks older than 6 months

\- Dormant accounts where the bank is unable to contact the account owner have their balances transferred to the state (State Seizure)

The latter probably makes a little more sense in this case since you could (depending on the issuer) just request another check from the source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If I have a good understanding of how the bitcoin protocol works, and is well versed in cryptography, does anyone have a tip on what to read to understand about the Stellar protocol?

Just some quick Googling on my phone led me down cryptobro low quality content, unsurprisingly.

EDIT: And also, this implementation looks really neat, congrats! It made me excited about crypto currency again!

<comment><USER16> Have you tried their white paper? [https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar- consensus-protocol.pd...](https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus- protocol.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Keybase is a really cool application regardless of Stellar, so don't be deterred by the comments!

Free, encrypted git repos and file storage as well as ID assertion and chat.

</comment><comment><USER18> I <3 Keybase. I have been beta testing this for a year or so. It came out during the last crypto boom, it is a great feature.

</comment><comment><USER19> As a relatively long-time Keybase user, I went in and set up my Stellar wallet on my phone. There does not appear to be any way to fund this wallet, though. Reading the comments here, I guess I'd have to buy Stellar on some other exchange and ... transfer it to my wallet? (So I'd have a wallet on an exchange, and a wallet on Keybase?)

This is not good UX.

<comment><USER20> It's like any other currency. If you wanted to buy GBP, you'd have to go to an exchange and transfer them to your bank, which had to support GBP for your account.

Sure, it would be better UX if they could charge you some USD and give you Lumens, but I don't think it's worse than obtaining any other currency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I like Keybase, I just find the name a little odd to push as a cool IM to normal people. I'm also still waiting to see them release their own email service, maybe something that can cleanly interface with ProtonMail?

</comment><comment><USER22> I wonder how the Lumen value is being derived. I assume whatever current worth is on Coinbase Pro at the time the amount is sent, considering they namedrop Coinbase Pro as a place to buy Lumens.

<comment><AUTHOR> CoinMarketCap's paid API. We're open to considering other data sources.

<comment><USER23> I would suggest OpenMarketCap instead. CoinMarketCap is known to include exchanges that fake their volume and I wouldn't be surprised if their price data is somewhat manipulated too.

[https://openmarketcap.com/exchanges/faq](https://openmarketcap.com/exchanges/faq)

<comment><USER24> Correct. The price especially is wrong on CMC when there is high volume events.

I also invite the OP to check out Blockmodo's API. We deliver this data to developers and institutional investors.

[https://blockmodo.com/docs/api](https://blockmodo.com/docs/api)

We stream everything which includes the price, trades, news, social media and community posts, and code checkins.

On the price side, we have two channels. We have a stream channel and a ticker channel. The stream channel derives the price of tokens by looking at raw trades from a select set of exchanges which have been vettted.

We are based in SF and happy to help at no charge! Drop us a note.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Keybase is now a wire transmitter.

Just without KYC/AML.

Yet.

<comment><USER26> It's a non-custodial wallet. Per recent FinCEN guidance, non-custodial wallets are not regulated as money transmitters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> For folks that want to learn more about stellar: [https://github.com/0xfe/hacking-stellar](https://github.com/0xfe/hacking- stellar)

</comment><comment><USER28> Stellar was one of the only cryptos I actually spent some money on, and it seems like one of the few that are still trying to progress

</comment><comment><USER29> Is interstellar still around? I love the tech, but I believe keybase affixed horse to wrong cart.

</comment><comment><USER30> When will open proof be available for everyone?

<comment><USER31> You mean this? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19639297](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19639297)

<comment><USER30> I mean how they say all that but refuse to add fediverse sites and others that don't share the political views of the founders of Keybase or the mainstream Mastodon crowd.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Exciting news! Can't wait to start using it!

</comment><comment><USER33> This is super cool! Making it easier to send or receive crypto is a worthy cause! :-)</comment>


Google Is 'Disappointed' with California's New Self-Driving Cars Rules - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2015/12/16/google-california-rules-self-driving-cars/ <comment><USER2> Classic example of the government preventing innovation.</comment>


Show HN: Automaza – A VR Programming Game - <AUTHOR> https://nimblegorilla.itch.io/automaza <comment><USER2> Does it work with Oculus Rift?

<comment><AUTHOR> I developed it with a Vive and WMR headsets.

It should work on Oculus with the right setup, but I haven't tested that.</comment></comment>


The Future is Movie OS - <AUTHOR> http://danhon.com/2010/04/16/the-future-is-movie-os/ We make fun of fictional Movie OS because it's "not realistic" (it's not), but haven't recognised that it fixes a problem we've not been dealing with adequately: creating intuitive software user experiences where actions result in transparently understood actions.<p>I argue that the requirements of Movie OS (that they must clearly convey critical plot information) produce clear lessons that we can learn from when we design user experiences. A dialog box with good copy and "Are you sure?" isn't good enough anymore. <comment><USER2> You may be onto something here.

I remember reading somewhere that Bond gadgets become true after something like 30 years, however I suspect that this pace of development will be speed up dramatically as time goes on. Some examples off the top of my head: GPS - there's an old Bond movie with a analog 'homing device', weapons on cars, cars that can drive on the road and fly also, 'stealth technology' like in Die Another Day (in development).

Getting back to movie inspired OSs, the guy who designed the amazing gesture interface behind those in 'Minority Report' started a company and has prototype UI in development:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwVBzx0LMNQ>

[http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/futuristic-minority- repor...](http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/futuristic-minority-report- computer-interface-makes-a-real-life-debut-20100217/)

<comment><USER3> The gesturing interface in MR does not solve the gorilla-arm syndrome problem. Gesture interfaces should be based on slight hand and face movement, maybe with voice cues.

<comment><USER4> Obligatory Hitchhikers quote:

"For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive — you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme."

<comment><USER2> Life imitating art and vice versa.

Sci-Fi has a great influence in developing new technology, as it's a great source of ideas. Take the moon landing as an example.

To follow on from the quote you gave above, the next stage is thought-control of machines. It's got it's own difficulties too though - it's very difficult to clear your mind to the degree necessary to control things:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uyrd0uOuyms>

<comment><USER3> > Life imitating art and vice versa.

Am I the only one that finds it tremendously amusing when life imitates comedy?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think to a certain extent we already had Movie OS in the early 00s / late 90s when all kinds of apps were skinned. People would make all kinds of baroque skins that looked like they came out of movies, that acted much like this, but you know what? They were cluttered and hard to use.

Who remembers Winamp 3, with its fancy skins[1]. I know I breathed a sigh of relief when iTunes with its simple, yet highly functional, interface came out.

1\. As an example: <http://www.thg.ru/technews/images/winamp_skin-270206.jpg>

<comment><AUTHOR> This misses the point. Skinning - in the Winamp model of 'same functionality but different look' - is not the same as effective visual storytelling and usage of animation.

I'm not talking about just how Movie OS looks, but how it behaves as a whole. I agree that sticking a Star Trek skin on Windows 98 reduces usability.

<comment><USER5> Well, then why do all the examples in the article look like those horrible skinned apps?

I have a feeling that what the author proposes leads us down the road of pretty but ridiculous interfaces.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Unfortunatelly, Movie OS is horrible security-wise.

<comment><USER7> I searched the BugTraq archives and found not one single entry for MovieOS vulnerabilities. Where's the disclosure??

<comment><USER8> The two biggest problems I know of:

The available user password space is so small that random jabbing at the keyboard will get you root access in under a minute.

The MovieOS developers refuse to remove the UPLOAD VIRUS "functionality" that routes malware past any and all defenses.

<comment><USER6> Yep. Also the fact that you can "bruteforce" most password-protected door locks one character at a time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interestingly enough, the "It's a UNIX operating system" moment from Jurassic Park used real software. It's called fsn: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn>

<comment><USER10> You know, having taking a look at FSN's home page I really don't think I would want file sizes represented in either of the ways it does.

I've been using Eagle Mode for about a week - a zoomable UI - and while it's ugly I really can't praise the file manager highly enough. It is a fantastic improvement over the best conventional file managers, but representing file size visually would ruin it. <http://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/>

<comment><USER11> I just installed Eagle Mode - very interesting indeed. The fact that you can put instructions, documentation etc. right there in situ with the relevant controls is quite interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There was an article at UIST (a user interface conference) making similar points about 15 years ago. Here's one free version of the paper: <http://research.sun.com/techrep/1995/abstract-33.html> That paper had some actual concrete recommendations for different kinds of animations that were implemented in Self.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fantastic - thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> And people will still ignore the flashing lights because they want to click the dancing bunny.

<comment><USER14> Maybe it will become an arms race of escalating cuteness. The OS designer needs something cuter to draw your attention away from the dancing bunny, which leads the dancing bunny malware author to come up with something even cuter than that, etc.

<comment><USER15> In less than a year your computer will be leaking glitter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have to say, I hope the future looks a lot less like Movie OS and a lot more like the Anti-Mac: <http://www.useit.com/papers/anti-mac.html>

<comment><USER17> I thought this was a great quote from the Anti-Mac article:

"The desktop metaphor assumes we save training time by taking advantage of the time that users have already invested in learning to operate the traditional office with its paper documents and filing cabinets. But the next generation of users will make their learning investments with computers, and it is counterproductive to give them interfaces based on awkward imitations of obsolete technologies."

It reminds me of a recent (non-computer related) incident in my own life. My son's preschool teachers recently had the students in my son's class do an art project where they made phones out of two pieces of construction paper and a piece of yarn. The two pieces of construction paper were cut to look like a old Bell telephone handset and base. I'm sure some of you can see where this is going... the amusing, to me at least, result was that all of the children followed directions and built their project, but couldn't identify what it was. Most of them had never seen telephones with a cord and couldn't figure out how an object too big to fit in your pocket was supposed to be a phone. :-)

I _think_ this illustrates a long term problem with computer interfaces that mimic real world objects and/or interactions, even in the simple case of icons that resemble real-world objects. The real world changes. We haven't had to deal with that much yet, because visual computer user interfaces have only been prevalent so recently. But as time wears on, I think this is only going to get more awkward.

As an example related to my story above, both the iPhone UI and the Android UI use an icon that looks like an old Bell telephone handset to represent the dialer. That image still makes sense to _my_ generation, but IMHO to my kids it's just gonna look like a wierd abstract symbol. Similarly, many applications use an icon that looks like a Rolodex to represent the "phonebook" application. Heck, I think I've got co-workers who've never seen a Rolodex!.

<comment><USER18> Just as floppy has become the icon for Save buttons. You and I have used floppies, so it makes a fair amount of sense, but many people will never see a real one.

<comment><USER17> Great example!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I guess the thing may be that movies have the luxury of make-believe; that is, they have absolute freedom with these interfaces because as someone else pointed out, they don't actually have to function. Sure, their dialogs and warning messages are great to convey a single important message, but what about someone who needs to do something on the computer that reports the "lockdown" status of an area? And do you really want it displayed with a huge green bar every time you get into something that was previously protected? Aren't there some situations where discretion is preferable?

In the milder example of the email flying off the screen, who wants to sit around and wait for a few seconds watching these animations in everyday use? Sure, they're a neat one-off or demo, but when you have a stack of emails to pop off, nobody wants to sit around and wait for that cute little animation to finish. You can probably toggle it, but after the first few times, who would leave it on? It seems like something that would just make grandma's computer usage even slower.

I do think that we could probably look at movies more and try to cherry-pick some cool ideas for dialogs or animations, but in general movie widgets, like everything else in the movies, are larger-than-life. They wouldn't work if you tried to deploy them as a real usable UI.

<comment><AUTHOR> "And do you really want it displayed with a huge green bar every time you get into something that was previously protected? Aren't there some situations where discretion is preferable?"

Well - we won't know without trying. But it's clear that in the Read/Write Web Facebook case, a bunch of people had _thought_ that they had logged in to Facebook when in fact they hadn't. And that they didn't even know where they were.

You may not want it every time. But at the moment, we don't even have it at all. That's restrictive in the kind of messages we can send out.

For emails flying off the screen: the execution is in the detail. A few seconds may be too long. For some people, it may not even be long enough. But the animation isn't necessarily just showing that an email is being sent: it can convey a lot of other information in a clear, yet subtle way. It's interesting that there's no visual cue _when an email is sent_ that distinguishes between sending to a single individual or a group of people, or an even larger group of people.

<comment><USER20> _It's interesting that there's no visual cue when an email is sent that distinguishes between sending to a single individual or a group of people, or an even larger group of people._

Pure gold!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think it's nice for a UI to show you things in a way you can respond to on an almost instinctive level, but will it help with UI designers who just don't think?

</comment><comment><USER21> Completely 100% agreed. Apple already knows this which is why is makes such heavy use of animations and lavish graphics in its UIs.

</comment><comment><USER22> For my daily work of pounding out code, I'd certainly want none of this going on. I always disable silly OS animations. However, for my 2 kids who instantly 'get' my iPhone and iPad but feel less secure with my MacBook, I think Movie OS is the kind of thing that would convey useful meaning ... until they understood it all and the varnish wears off and they're asking how to disable the Movie so they can work with the OS.

<comment><AUTHOR> I completely agree - expanding the UI palette lets you use more varied, subtle (or less so) tools in different contexts for different audiences. People who _already understand_ the consequences of their actions may not want/need to be constantly reminded.

<comment><USER23> Those of us who are perfectly happy to interact with our computers through a command line are a vanishingly small proportion of people who use a computer.

But those of us who dwell in a black screen with white monospaced text and a flashing cursor need to make more human interfaces if we are to make computers more accessible. Movie OS is possibly overkill, but devices like the iPad show promising signs of progress in HCI.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. We need to get other people - people skilled in communicating to large audiences (and these people exist: they just exist as advertisers, graphic novelists, film directors, storyboard artists etc) involved in how we design our interfaces for everyone else, for the people who don't want to use a CLI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> To me, many of the issues are the computer telling the user about stuff they shouldn't have to worry about. For example, wouldn't cloud computing solve most of these problems by not giving the responsibility for the problem to the user?

 _Change your battery_ You shouldn't lose your work if the battery fails

 _Formatting this volume..._ People would not do sys. admin themselves like this

 _Permanent delete_ With storage so large nowadays, there is no particular reason to delete something for space reasons.

 _Disk full_ Shouldn't happen, in the cloud it could never happen, you just get charged more. Gmail for example was designed never to get full.

 _Checking for software_ In the cloud it would always be upto. date

 _Downloading messages progress bar_ Well with web apps it's either loaded or it's not.

Of course these are not the only problems, but are the type that are most difficult for users because they are more about sys. admin than getting the task done.

<comment><AUTHOR> I disagree, but I can see where you're coming from based on the examples I picked (which were all biased toward operating system maintenance actions, given the source material).

From the point of view of a naive user, there are new types of interactions that can have massive social implications: e.g. changing Facebook relationship status. At the moment, the notification of that status change to the user is pretty minimal. It does not, for example, make clear that that change will be propagated to, say, over 500 people, and all of their contacts.

There may be people who are more concerned about their social standing than whether they've accidentally formatted a volume or not.

<comment><USER24> Well really the problem with Facebook is that's too complex.

Though I'd agree there are non-sys admin problems that people have, but the worst problems are all sys. admin type ones, viruses, out of space, slowness.

The user-space stuff is nice to have, though the movies tend to have some impressive visualization and lots of data (like floorplans, schematics etc.) in order to show things like that. Facebook could maybe show a picture of your 500 friends and say "sending..." though.

<comment><USER10> You almost make it sound like it would only show you it's going out to 500 friends _after_ you clicked the button. :D

<comment><USER24> Well a decent undo would fix that

<comment><USER10> Undo is good, but I can't help but chuckle at the thought of "Whoops! He's not really my boyfriend" going out to 500 acquaintances 20 seconds after the opposite statement.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Comcast Blocks HBO Go from Working on Playstation 4 - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/blog/netneutrality/articles/20150303/12433530200/comcast-blocks-hbo-go-working-playstation-4-wont-coherently-explain-why.shtml

<comment><USER2> That's a very confused article.

So is the issue that you need to log into your Comcast account in order to active HBO GO, or is the issue that they're blocking it on the wire directly (i.e. blocking DNS, HTTP/S, etc)?

If it is to do with having to log into your Comcast account and then that account somehow authenticates HBO Go apps, then that has absolutely nothing to do with net neutrality or ISPs in general, and everything to do with the private business relationship between Comcast and HBO, and also how Comcast treats its customers.

If this issue is just about the Comcast account used to prove you subscribe to HBO Go, then why was the author so misleading implying it is about the ISP side of the business and or net neutrality? Was that on purpose or just poorly written.</comment>


War and Peace and Product - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@frankycaron/war-and-peace-and-product-6072a4bac125

<comment><AUTHOR> Wrote this up out of frustration tonight. Would love to hear from other PMs on here about what they've done to effectively scale product at their orgs.</comment>


Bloomberg: It's Not Just A Keyboard [video] - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/m/90701077

<comment><USER2> One of the interesting things about BB that I didn't really know before I interviewed there was how much of their stack they build themselves; for instance, they do a significant amount of their own hardware.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A new video was just produced and I figured the crowd here would appreciate delivery of a polished finished product, which is one of the reasons why a software company builds their own hardware. (Most people don't know we still make hardware!)</comment>


Anonymous-OS - <AUTHOR> http://sourceforge.net/projects/anonymous-os/

<comment><USER2> I was wondering myself how safe this would be to try out.

Maybe in a VM?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I was both cautious and curious. It looks like it is just bundled software (which seems useful), but with a certain risk factor (whatever that may be) that '?' tampered with the distro first.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sketchy?</comment>


Magento with enhanced media and image optimization - <AUTHOR> http://cloudinary.com/blog/magento_with_enhanced_media_and_image_optimization <comment><AUTHOR> New Magento plugin speeds up eCommerce stores and empowers them with cutting edge image features. This post describes the plugin and gives an overview of the features included and the setup involved.</comment>


How a prominent VC is helping reshape winning strategy for basketball - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-golden-state-warriors-have-revolutionized-basketball-1459956975 <comment><USER2> The premise of the title would be much more believable if the team's success weren't so heavily reliant on one guy who is a statistical outlier in his unique ability to shoot 3s. I suspect the Warriors' "winning strategy" could be largely duplicated just by luring Steph Curry away from the team.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point and would agree - without that one key player, the team does often play pretty much just like every other team. No doubt though that the game is changing from a day where big post-up players dominated to one in which most every team emphasizes 3-point shooting. Perhaps the Warriors are ahead of this curve apart from dependence on their mega-star player or just in giving him a setting in which he could best thrive.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I would've been convinced if the article had shown that the Warriors were winning with a higher number of threes taken across the board and with players that shot the average or slightly better from three-point range. The thing about a real 'systems' team like the San Antonio Spurs is that they don't need any particular player to put up crazy numbers, and they frequently have a bunch of players in or near the low double figures rather than consistently having a couple of players (often the same two) combining for 50 or more points.</comment></comment></comment>


Chart of the Day: Google is still a one-trick pony - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/google-search-profit-2010-10?utm_source=Triggermail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Silicon+Alley+Insider+Chart+Of+The+Day&utm_campaign=SAI_COTD_101510

<comment><USER2> Probably google's profit is much bigger in search market because you are more directed to searching for information on a service you may buy (and so, a company may be interested in advertising) than when you are watching a youtube video.

From my personal user point of view, i have searched very few times in youtube (just as an example) for a company or a product and then clicked on an ad. Just on the other side, i have done such thing many times on google.</comment>


Whatsapp got acquired by an insane amount.  Still safe to use whatsapp for work? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.qisc.us/post/77263136322/whatsapp-got-acquired-by-an-insane-amount-wait-is-it

<comment><USER2> was that safe?</comment>


Ask HN: Any other blind devs interested in working on dev tools for the blind? - <AUTHOR> Just lost my fourth job this year. I can't definitively claim it is because of my blindness, I may just not be very good at software development. But one thing is for sure, there are many dev tools that are either hard or impossible to use if you're blind. I'm looking at you JIRA, GitLab, Chrome Dev Tools, etc.<p>I'm tired of feeling helpless. I want to build tools that make my life easier. Any other blind devs in the same boat who would be interested in collaborating? <comment><USER3> I'm not blind but here's an (unsolicited) project idea for you.

To be candid, I have no idea what it feels like to be blind and have never paid much attention to accessibility other than reading a tutorial or two and making sure I use alt tags on my images. The main reason for that is that I'm lazy and based on my experience, most developers are in the same boat.

Now, if there was a service which would spin up a remote VM session inside my browser (a bit like BrowserStack or SauceLabs do) with all screen reader software setup and no screen (only audio), it'd make it a lot easier for me to experience my software as a blind user. There should probably also be a walkthrough to help new users use the screen reader and help them get started. If you're lucky, you could turn this into a business and it could indirectly help you achieve your goal of making better software for the blind by exposing more of us to your issues.

Anyways, I know you probably have more pressing issues to solve and I hope I didn't come across as arrogant, just throwing the idea out there.

<comment><USER4> As a partially sighted developer specializing in assistive technology, with several friends who are totally blind, I think this is an excellent project idea.

The cheapest way to do it would probably be using the Orca screen reader for GNU/Linux, probably combined with the MATE desktop (forked from GNOME 2) so one doesn't have to worry about 3D acceleration in the VM, which will presumably be hosted remotely on a cloud provider somewhere. The main technical challenge that springs to mind will be capturing all keyboard events in a browser window. This is particularly important because screen readers tend to rely on esoteric keyboard commands, which repurpose keys like CapsLock and Insert as modifiers. I don't know if this can actually be done in a normal web browser.

Anyway, just throwing out my quick thoughts on this. I don't currently have time to pursue it further myself.

<comment><USER5> _> I don't currently have time to pursue it further myself._

I work for a non-profit where we tackle accessibility issues related to the web, documents, and tech in general. We have a few Vagrant boxes that we use for development and testing, one of them is a Fedora box (GNOME 3 though) that comes with Orca configured [1] so that it doesn't prompt you for setup options. Chrome and Firefox are installed as well. If you have Vagrant and VirtualBox installed you can make use of it like so:

        vagrant init inclusivedesign/fedora24 && vagrant up

The box is ~2 GB. This is the repository for the box in question:

* [https://github.com/idi-ops/packer-fedora](https://github.com/idi-ops/packer-fedora)

* [https://atlas.hashicorp.com/inclusivedesign/boxes/fedora24](https://atlas.hashicorp.com/inclusivedesign/boxes/fedora24)

We track Fedora releases and update boxes fairly regularly so there should be a Fedora 25 one with Orca once there's an official release upstream.

I hope it can be of use to anyone here. If you have any questions we hang out in #fluid-work on Freenode.

[1] [https://github.com/gpii-ops/ansible-gpii- framework/blob/mast...](https://github.com/gpii-ops/ansible-gpii- framework/blob/master/tasks/configure.yml)

<comment><USER6> Do you think Fedora is a usable option as a totally blind person? I'm a totally blind software developer and looked at Linux several years ago. It didn't "just work" and since I already have Jaws for my job which requires Windows I never bothered trying to use the Linux GUI for an extended length of time. I'll have to look at this.

<comment><USER7> I'm blind and prefer Fedora because it tracks GNOME more closely, and GNOME seems to reliably get accessibility right whereas Ubuntu/Unity doesn't.

So admittedly my development workflow isn't super high-tech. I do lots of JavaScript, some Rust, and a few others. All my languages have reliable command line tooling, which of course works well under Linux.

Some blind folks advised me to try Windows because it was supposed to make me more productive. I tried it for about a year and a half. I've used Linux since Slackware96, and whenever something failed under Windows I was stuck googling error codes and tracking down system logs. I can launch a Linux system upgrade from the command line. If it fails, it fails for an obvious/searchable reason, and prints its failure cause in the terminal. I don't have to track down logs in non-standard locations, google odd hex codes, etc.

Under Windows, the best I could find for accessible JS/Rust dev was Notepad++. That's just an enhanced text editor. At that rate I might as well use Gedit/Vim under Linux for development, which I do and it works well.

If you're developing heavily in Windows specific tech, then Linux wouldn't be a good fit. But as a technical user I'm quite happy with Linux generally, and Fedora specifically. About the only accessible Windows things I miss are audio games and Netflix, and my VM satisfies most of those. There are corner cases where Orca/Firefox act up, but under Windows there were _lots_ of cases where I fought the OS, so there's just no perfect solution. I'd take a stronger foundation over slightly less accessibility any day.

<comment><USER8> Windows 10 just works and now we have WSL (i.e. bash i.e. run all your favorite CLI tooling). In general, Microsoft has gotten a lot better about Windows just working. Perhaps Linux has too, but you still had to make sure you had fully Linux-compatible hardware and then do extra steps to get Wi-fi, last time I played with it.

Also, the web browsing experience on Windows is so much better, and the audio stack doesn't fall down at the drop of a hat because you edited a config file wrong (hope you have someone sighted who knows how to unedit it for you). I'm not sure I'd call Linux a stronger foundation; this was not at all my experience with it. OS X is, but then desktop Voiceover sucks to the point where you can't really program with it (basic things like terminal do odd things, nevermind the 10 or so keystrokes needed to navigate from code to the project explorer in Xcode. And we have to mention the speech latency). Then they just killed the function keys, which is an additional problem knocking OS X off the list.

But I think the biggest thing about Windows for me is that it's got synths which are capable of being intelligible upwards of 800 words a minute. Linux didn't even let you get at these settings via Orca last I tried it, and you can't set the inflection either, so it never emphasized punctuation. When your interface is linear and top-to-bottom, the biggest bottleneck in the general case is how fast you can go with the synth, and any platform which significantly cuts this down is therefore not a winner in my book.

But whether or not you agree with my points, I consider it pretty clear-cut that only a blind programmer even has the option of trying Linux in the first place, and certainly not a new one at that. You need too much knowledge to have even a halfway decent experience. In terms of making things accessible and having them matter, you've got to hit Windows first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm also a blind software developer. I scrape by building apps[0] and services[1] for other blind people, and running the occasional crowdfunding[2] campaign.

First off, you're 100% correct when you talk about how devtools are inaccessible. This problem is an historic one, stretching back as far as early versions of Visual Studio, or other early IDEs on Windows. Basically, the people who build the tools make the tools for themselves, and not being blind, make inaccessible by default tooling.

I do most of my work on Windows, using the NVDA screen reader, and consequently I have the ability to write or use add-ons for my screen reader to help with a variety of tasks[3]. This being said, this always means more work for equal access, if access is even possible.

I'm interested in any sort of collaborative effort you might propose. Targeting accessibility issues in common devtools does seem to me like a reasonable place to start attacking this problem. I had read a few months ago that Marco Zehe, a blind developer at Mozilla, was pushing some work forward for the Firefox devtools[4], but haven't heard much about that recently, and I think they might be distracted trying to get a11y and e10s working together.

Basically, I'm interested in helping in any way you might suggest, and from the thread here it looks like there are some enthusiastic people at least willing to listen. My email is in my profile, let's make something awesome.

[0] [https://GetAccessibleApps.com](https://GetAccessibleApps.com)

[1] [https://CAPTCHABeGone.com](https://CAPTCHABeGone.com)

[2] [https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/nvda-remote- access/](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/nvda-remote-access/)

[3] [https://github.com/mohammad- suliman/visualStudioAddon](https://github.com/mohammad- suliman/visualStudioAddon)

[4] [https://www.marcozehe.de/2016/01/26/making-the-firefox- devel...](https://www.marcozehe.de/2016/01/26/making-the-firefox-developer- tools-accessible/)

<comment><USER10> Is there anything that would be a relatively small change, but would make a big difference to blind developers?

If it's closed source like a feature in Visual Studio or some other company, I'll volunteer to ask them for it.

Maybe low hanging fruit is the easiest way to convince people at first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am sighted myself but I work with a company called Bristol Braille Technology and we are trying to make an affordable multi-line Braille e-book reader.

If you have an interest in Braille and have software development skills there might be something to do there. The UI program that drives our prototypes is open source and available on GitHub. [https://github.com/Bristol- Braille/canute-ui](https://github.com/Bristol-Braille/canute-ui)

We have plans to open source the hardware as well.

If you want to add support at a lower level, our current USB protocol is outlined in this repository. It is a a dev-kit I knocked together to allow some Google engineers to write drivers for BRLTTY (and thus for ChromeOS). [https://github.com/Bristol-Braille/canute-dev- kit](https://github.com/Bristol-Braille/canute-dev-kit)

</comment><comment><USER12> Hi, I'm also a blind dev - successfully been developing back-end systems and libraries at Microsoft for over a decade. There are certainly accessibility problems, but the awesome thing about being a dev is that you can also make your own solutions. Look at T V Raman at Google, and Emacspeak - which whilst not everyone's cup of tea, certainly serves him well.

For any developer, it's important to practice your craft, and when looking for a job, it's valuable to have a portfolio of work you've contributed to. So you can get multiple benefit by helping create a tool which will help you be more productive, and also show your skill.

Clearly, this project should be something that you're passionate about, but one project I've had on my when-I-have-time list is below - I would be happy to work with others who are interested (@blinddev @ctoth @jareds).

After your text editor / IDE, one of the next most important tools is a tool for tracking bugs/tasks. Unfortunately, many of the common ones, like VSTS, Jira, and Trello, are either not accessible, or at least not productively usable with a screen reader.

Over my career I've developed my own scripts for working with such systems, but it would be good to have something that others can also benefit from. I should probably put my initial bits on Github, but time is currently consumed by other projects. Email me if this interests you. Also happy to mentor on general career challenges around being a blind software engineer.

</comment><comment><USER13> Low vision programmer here. I've made a few tools that make my own programming easier, like a lightweight version of Emacspeak [https://github.com/smythp/eloud](https://github.com/smythp/eloud) (now in melpa) and just gave a talk on blind hackers and our tradition of bootstrapping: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8_O3joo4aU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8_O3joo4aU) Would be happy to help out with a project, email at my name + 01 + @ + gmail.com.

</comment><comment><USER14> I am an adjunct professor in a CS department. I usually end up with introductory level courses, often for non-majors. This semester I have a visually impaired student in an introductory Java course who is unable to see the screen. He uses JAWS as his primary screen reader. To my great surprise, most of the tools we typically use were completely inaccessible to screen readers. I spent the first several weeks of the semester scrambling to find a reasonable set of tools that would work for him. We settled on Notepad++ and the terminal. Also, I provide him with special versions of the slide decks, readings, assignments, quizzes and exams.

I would be very interested to learn how visually impaired developers such as yourself and others got started, and for any suggestions for how I can make my student's experience more positive.

Thanks.

<comment><USER15> The solution you've settled upon (text editor plus CLI) is pretty much the best you and your student can hope for at the moment. When I was at university, speaking as a screen reader user myself, the very first thing I asked my tutors was whether I could skip all the Eclipse learning and jump straight into command line compilation.

Further down the line, the student might find that programming is no longer so new to them that they can afford to explore something else. But at the moment, if they're a beginner, trying to learn a tool like an IDE, which is supposed to make your life easier but generally has the opposite effect for blind devs, is just going to confuse matters. So I would stick with what you're doing, because you probably won't get any better support from the disability services team at the university because it's not an area they know.

Your student needs to learn, sometimes the hard way, that if you're blind and want to make things, you have to be prepared to do things in ways which go completely against the grain - having to basically use Windows to be productive is one of them - and to solve these boilerplate accessibility problems without becoming discouraged.

<comment><USER14> Thanks. That is very helpful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm a totally blind developer and have some of the same issues you do. As far as Chrome dev tools go I've given up on doing any kind of UI work, partially because of accessibility and partially because it does not interest me. My current job is working on a large Java web app. Luckily my company is understanding when it comes to UI so I don't do much of that work but do a lot of API and database work. API's can be tested using curl and database stuff can be done from a command-line. The advantage to working on the app is if accessibility gets completely broken it's discovered early and made to work well enough. We use Eclipse as an IDE and it works pretty well with Jaws. I've used IntelliJ a bit and it's what I'd call barely usable. I am hoping it will continue to improve, the impetus for adding accessibility appears to have been Google switching from Eclipse to IntelliJ when coming out with Android studio. Hopefully Google will continue to insure accessibility improves. As far as JIRA goes I agree with you. I'd really like to hear from Atlassian why they can't display dashboards and issue lists using tables to provide any kind of semantic information. I've found your best bet with JIRA is to have someone sited help set up filters that display what you need. Export the results of the filter to Excel and you can brows a lot of issues quite quickly. I haven't used Gitlab but find Github to be fairly easy to use in the limited experience I have with it. I'm not particularly interested in building tools from scratch since I don't have a lot of free time but would be interested in trying anything that comes out of this.

</comment><comment><USER16> I am working on a project to parse an image which then synthesizes an audio representation which retains all the information of the source image ... next step is to parse live video to enable people to hear what others see ... shoot me an email as well ... its not specific to dev tools yet could parley into a general enabler ... I am using a Hilbert Curve ... nice intro video at [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuiryHHTrjU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuiryHHTrjU)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, lots of potential here. Will definitely reach out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm not blind, but I would certainly like to contribute where I can. Shoot me an email (it's in my profile).

The world can certainly use more open source accessibility standards, protocols and tools.

</comment><comment><USER18> I am not blind nor a programmer. But I do have serious eyesight problems and other handicaps. I also have moderating experience. Given the number of people saying "Shoot me an email" I have gone ahead and set up an email list via Google Groups called Blind Dev Works. If anyone wants to use that as a collaboration space, shoot me an email (talithamichele at gmail dot com) and I will send you an invitation.

<comment><AUTHOR> In addition to this Google Group, I have also created the following GitHub organization: [https://github.com/blind-dev](https://github.com/blind-dev)

And have started a website to provide a resource for software development and accessibility: [https://blinddev.org](https://blinddev.org)

Both are works in progress. If interested in contributing feel free to reach out, my email is in my profile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Out of curiosity, what operating system and screen reader(s) are you using?

As a partially sighted developer, I generally use a screen reader for web browsing and email, but read the screen visually for my actual programming work. So I don't have significant first-hand experience with the accessibility (or lack thereof) of development tools. But some of my totally blind programmer friends have expressed some frustration with the accessibility of some tools, especially web applications. They generally use Windows with NVDA ([http://www.nvaccess.org/](http://www.nvaccess.org/)). At least with NVDA, you can write add-ons (in Python) to help with specific applications and tasks.

</comment><comment><USER19> Any chance you could start with an education component? I think most of us don't really know the nuances of a blind developer's workflow, especially which tooling breaks down where and if there is anything that is infeasible.

<comment><AUTHOR> What would this look like?(no pun intended) Like a web site that documents accessibility issues for common web sites and software? Or a guide that walks through a typical development process for a blind dev?

<comment><USER19> Something like the latter. I think just a few blog posts would be very helpful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think you are smart to consider your developer skills as a separate thing to improve. One way to objectively measure this might be to explain a technical concept to someone.

For example, could you read this article and then give an overview of the main issues of web site performance? Could you then come up with one recommendation for a performance improvement in a code base you're familiar with? Could you justify in practical terms why your recommendation was the best bang for the buck, vs. other other possible improvements? [https://medium.baqend.com/building-a-shop-with-sub-second- pa...](https://medium.baqend.com/building-a-shop-with-sub-second-page-loads- lessons-learned-4bb1be3ed07)

Now, how do you judge yourself?

1). Have the conversation with a dev whose skills and opinion you trust.

2). Record your answers on audio, and ask someone on HN to give you fair and constructive feedback. Many here would be glad to do this (feel free to ping me as well).

</comment><comment><USER20> I would very much like to make the D programming language dev tools work better for visually impaired users. Any suggestions you can give would be welcome, pull requests even more so!

dlang.org

</comment><comment><USER21> Yes please! I'm not blind either, but would love to collaborate / contribute also. My email address is in my profile. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER22> Currently, I'm launching an app that is reading Slack messages out loud - <USER2> Parrot [http://teamparrot.artpi.net/](http://teamparrot.artpi.net/) . Once launched, it will be open source (built in react native) If you think it's useful, I will welcome contributions.

I am not blind, but I designed it to operate without looking at screen. If the app will take off, I'm considering into forking/pivoting into RSS reader that also is not using screen. App is already accepted in the app store, I'm sorting out launch details.

Please accept my deepest apologies for the shitty job we (the developers ) are doing at providing interfaces for vision impaired.

Probably when we're all old, we'll have vision problems of our own :).

</comment><comment><USER23> I am a completely blind developer and have been working on and off with code for about 20 years. When I started I was able to see well enough to work without the assistance of a magnifier or screen-reader, now I rely completely on VoiceOver and JAWS.

I too find frustration with some of the tools with which I work. Although they may slow me down, they seldom create complete barriers. Most of my work at this point in time is with PHP and Javascript, so this may help the situation, I am less familiar with the current state of affairs of the accessibility of developing with other languages.

All of the complaining I do about JIRA aside, I do find it to be a reasonably usable tool for what I need (page load times annoy me far more than accessibility issues). There are some tasks that I cannot complete (reordering backlog items), but I collaborate with team members, which can help us all to have better context about the rationale for changes.

Gitlab I find quite poorly accessible, but thankfully it is just a UI on top of an otherwise excellent tool (git). I find that the same trick that works with evaluating GitHub PRs works with Gitlab MRs. If you putt .diff after the URL to a PR or MR, you can see the raw output of the diff of the branches being compared.

Debuggers are definitely my biggest current pain point. I tend to use MacGDBp for PHP. This is quite reasonably accessible. It allows me to step through code, to see the value of all variables, and to understand the file / line number being executed. It isn't possible to see the exact line of code, so I need to have my code editor open and to track along.

I haven't found a very accessible Javascript debugger. For Javascript and DOM debugging I still find myself using Firebug. I use lots of console.log() statements, and would rather be able to set breakpoints and step through code execution. That being said, other than "does this look right?", I find there is little that being blind prevents me from doing with Javascript. As recently as last night I was squashing bugs in a React app that I am helping to build for one of my company's customers.

I'd be happy to learn more about any projects you take on to improve web application development tools and practices for persons with disabilities. Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn if you would like to talk.

[https://www.linkedin.com/in/ezufelt](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ezufelt)

</comment><comment><USER24> Legally blind developer here. I still have some vision in one eye and I make extensive use of it as far as being able to primarily code with screen magnification and some spoken text for select code all using OS X). I've had good success in my career but I will say I've had to at times work a lot harder to get the same results as fully sighted coworkers.

I'm mostly responding to encourage you to keep at it, and if you haven't tried Mac OS, maybe give it a whirl. Apple is pretty good about accessibility and their accessibility team is very good at accepting and acting upon feedback.

<comment><USER25> Guess it helps that apple does employ at least one blind engineer. [1]

[1][http://mashable.com/2016/07/10/apple-innovation-blind- engine...](http://mashable.com/2016/07/10/apple-innovation-blind- engineer/#uMR5WvohmZqK)

<comment><USER24> FWIW i have it on good authority that Apple employs at least 4-5 blind developers on the accessibility team alone, possibly more elsewhere in the company.

<comment><USER25> That makes sense. Perhaps TS should try and get a job at one of the big companies like google, apple, facebook etcetera. Being blind and have programming experience might be an asset for working on an accessibility team like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Would it be helpful for a news site or blog to call out software that won't take easy steps to improve accessibility?

My sight issues are not comparable to being blind, but as an example, I've asked Pandora for simple accessibility improvements for years and they never take action. Have even offered to write (less than a page) the code for them.

Would they (and software tool vendors) feel the same way if this were highlighted on a high traffic web page?

<comment><AUTHOR> There might be something here. I'm personally not a fan of shaming, but documenting where a piece of software falls short and making specific recommendations in a public forum might go a long way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I have a tool I'm working on that is specifically geared towards assisting the transcription of printed books to braille for The Clovernook Center for the Blind [1] built on top of Atom as an extension.

A super-rudimentary basic version will be something I finish when I've the time in the coming months. I was hoping to get some interested from the blind community and get ideas for further OSS work involving that general space (editors).

<comment><USER15> FYI, Atom isn't particularly screen reader friendly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm not blind but I have very poor eyesight in my left eye which makes reading tiring so I started this experimental Morse-based system [https://github.com/Hendekagon/MorseCoder](https://github.com/Hendekagon/MorseCoder) for the Apple trackpad. It's not very successful. What I really want is a fully haptic dynamically-textured surface.

</comment><comment><USER28> Not a blind dev, and would love to help community as much as possible, though I don't even know where to start :( Would be really helpful to have centralized place which directs developers effort to valuable open source projects.

Another interesting idea: try using braille screen for ourselves, so we as dev's will be able to work at complete darkness without any light :)

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm not blind either, but I too would be interested in contributing.

Send me an email; my address is in my profile.

</comment><comment><USER30> One of the best (and most engaging) HN threads of the year from my perspective. So much better than "$STARTUP raised an n hundred million dollar series Q" on TechCrunch article.

Thanks @blinddev.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're welcome. :)

I was feeling pretty down and wanted something positive to come out of it. Glad to see I'm not alone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I am not blind but my daughter has albinism and low vision as a result. I have been looking to find ways to contribute and make it easier for her and others.

I would be happy to help.

</comment><comment> saverio-murgia I am not blind but might have the chance to offer you a dev job (related to blindness). Here's the product we are working on: [http://horus.tech](http://horus.tech) Just send me an email at saverio at horus dot tech if interested

<comment><USER32> I'm not sure what's the protocol for this kind of stuff (I'm not blind), but, your website being directed at blind people, wouldn't it be better to be set english as the main language?

<comment> saverio-murgia It should pick English or Italian depending on your browser language. If it does not, then it's a bug. I'll look into it

<comment><USER33> I have my OS and browser set to English and am browsing from a Dutch IP address. I get the Italian page. Not sure which part of "Accept-Language: en- US,en" (which Firefox sends) is unclear.

Edit: oh there is an English button in the right top. Only saw it just now (a flag might be more colorful to spot).

<comment><USER32> I have a similar setup: OS and browser set to English from brazilian IP address. I got the italian page as default.

And I also took some time to find where to change to english.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> [https://github.com/prettydiff/a11y-tools](https://github.com/prettydiff/a11y-tools)

</comment><comment><USER35> I am not blind, but would very much like to contribute. I have been developing tools and applications for a very long time now.

Do let me know how to contact you.

</comment><comment><USER36> Dear blinddev,

I'm a seeing student with an upcoming six week block of time to do a out of school project. I have previous experience developing accessable software and would love to work with you. If you're interested, shoot me an email at firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER37> > I'm looking at you JIRA, GitLab, Chrome Dev Tools, etc.

I'm not sure that using tools that try to provide a good visual experience is the right approach. Have you tried writing scrapers that provide an optimized textual representation?

<comment><USER38> I disagree, I think we should all have the responsibility to make sure our sites and apps are accessible.

<comment><USER37> Yes and no.

Yes, we should all make our sites/apps accessible.

No, some sites/apps are great exactly because they offer a better visual representation that allows faster parsing of the information presented to the vast majority with adequate eyesight.

Just because someone develops a great way to visually take in information, that person should not be forced to develop an equally great textual representation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'd be interested in discussing this with you further offline. I'm not blind, but definitely interested in exploring ways to help. If you add some information to your profile about how to reach you I'll reach out.

</comment><comment><USER40> I know you're asking for collaborators and not recommendations for tools, but since you were mentioning Chrome Devtools I wanted to make you aware of kite.el [1] which I believe TV Raman had working with Emacspeak [2] at one point. kite.el is unmaintained, but it might make for a good starting point?

[1] [http://github.com/jscheid/kite](http://github.com/jscheid/kite) [2] [http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/](http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/)

</comment><comment><USER41> I created a framework for the Amazon Echo. I've been curious if it could help the blind. My e-mail is John At John Wheeler Dot Org. I'd be willing to help you if you could use me.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have an Echo and it is a life changer for a blind person. I've written a few trivial skills for it, but definitely would like to do more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I am a 100% blind, (primarily) web application developer, and, main focus area at moment is PHP, MySQL, javascript/jQuery, with things like python as a form of side-line, and, main thing for me is finding right alternative tools to use - work on windows platform, using NVDA screen reader, which itself is done using python, and, while I use both WAMP and XAMPP on dev machine, I use a specific programmer's code/text editor, called edSharp, which was created by a blind dev himself, and, for things like DB management, I generally work with a web interface, from adminer.org, which can handle multiple DB platforms, but, on the program-l VI programmer's mailing list, there are a bunch of guys who work with a wide range of dev tools, for all sorts of platforms, and, there are probably a few guys there who might be interested in helping with this type of thing, but, for example, guys there work with things like eclipse, sodbeans, VS.Net, and, multiple other tools, at times with workarounds, etc., but, really just depends on your primary dev focus areas? Either way, check out [http://www.freelists.org/list/program-l](http://www.freelists.org/list/program-l)

</comment><comment><USER18> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12820985](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12820985)

FYI, I sent courtesy invitations to nine people who said in this discussion "shoot me an email." One email address provided here was invalid. One or two other people who said "email in profile" did not have an email in their profile. If you want an invitation, contact me (talithamichele at gmail etc).

</comment><comment><USER43> There's a guy called Octavian Rasnita who's a blind perl developer who I've met before. We basically never agreed on anything but he always disagreed with me intelligently. You might be able to contact him by emailing user teddy on domain cpan.org. No idea if he's a good person to talk to or not tbh but I've always found him worth arguing with.

If you do contact him please blame me so he can shout at me, not you, if I made the wrong guess here.

</comment><comment><USER44> I'd help, shoot me an email. (I'm not blind)

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm part of the Blockly team ([https://developers.google.com/blockly/](https://developers.google.com/blockly/)), an open source project for visual drag-and-drop programming, usually targeting kids. Despite being a "visual programming editor" first, we are exploring blind accessible (i.e., screen reader ready) variants of our library.

See our first demo: [https://blockly- demo.appspot.com/static/demos/accessible/ind...](https://blockly- demo.appspot.com/static/demos/accessible/index.html)

Right now, it is effectively a different renderer for the same abstract syntax tree. We'd love to see people evaluate the direction we are currently going, and possibly apply the same accessible navigation to our existing render.

In terms of dev tools, Blockly blocks are usually constructed using Blockly ([https://blockly- demo.appspot.com/static/demos/blockfactory/i...](https://blockly- demo.appspot.com/static/demos/blockfactory/index.html)). That said, no one has considered what it would take to make our dev tools blind accessible. The fundamentals are there.

Granted, Blockly programming is far from being as powerful as other languages. It is aimed at novice programmers, whether for casual use or to teach the fundamentals of computational thinking. You can write an app in Blockly ([http://appinventor.mit.edu/](http://appinventor.mit.edu/)).

If anyone is interested, reach out to us: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/blockly](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/blockly)

</comment><comment><USER46> My research is on dev tools so I have a huge interest in this. Also, I interned at Microsoft Research and got to meet a few of their blind devs and how they are building tools to support others.

There is also a fair amount of research out there on the topic (see Richard Ladner at UW).

Feel free to send me an email if you get anything going!

</comment><comment><USER47> I'm making web apps and mobile apps and I'd like to learn how to make my apps more accessible. Is there a community where I can ask for assistance with accessibility testing? I'd be willing to pay for testing. Thank you kindly. Nanch.

</comment><comment><USER48> Just in case you don't know this still, there is a latex package for braille. You can write a .tex file in english an put \usepackage{braille} in the preamble of your tex files and your output will be translated to braille automatically. The pdf can be then raised printed with the appropriate hardware. You could find it useful for documenting your software (tutorials, faqs, manuals, etc...), in both languages even if your collaborators don't know a single word in braille.

You will need to have the package texlive-fonts-extra installed.

You could want also to contact with the maintainers of brltty, cl-brlapi, ebook-speaker or brailleutils

</comment><comment><USER49> I'm a programming language developer, and I'm interested in developing languages and programming environments for the blind and visually impaired, or at least making existing languages more usable. Feel free to get in touch.

</comment><comment><USER50> Great initiative! Are you considering setting up a blog / github page / anything to keep track and coordinate the effort?

I'm asking because though I'd love to help I know I won't be able to commit to it full-time. So it would be great to be able to follow up and get an idea of where the project is going, what areas it is tackling, etc.

Also, maybe a "Show HN" could help spreading to a wider audience whatever you set up.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have created both, still a work in progress, but once there's something to show a Show HN might be in order.

[https://github.com/blind-dev](https://github.com/blind-dev) [https://blinddev.org](https://blinddev.org)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I wish you well and will help in any way that I can. ld

</comment><comment><USER18> Project update: [http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/10/blind-dev- wo...](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/10/blind-dev-works.html)

Posted to HN here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12841156](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12841156)

</comment><comment><USER52> Thanks so much for posting this. I'm not blind or partially sighted, but I do work on one of the software tools that you mention.

I would love to learn more about how you would like development tools to support you in your work.

I know as an industry we have a long way to go, and I would love to work with you to get us there.

My email is in my profile, and I will also reach out to Talitha. Hoping we get a chance to chat.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, will reach out for sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> If you develop frontend stuff, please get in touch at email@example.com . Company I work at developing single page app for higher ed and we constantly struggle with proper practices to make UI to be accessible to people with bad sight. Who knows, maybe it will perfect opportunity for both you and my company.

</comment><comment><USER38> Out of curiosity, what kind of developer are you? (e.g. languages you know, frameworks, platforms, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER54> Hi blinddev,

You might want to read this: TOOLS of Blind Programmer [https://www.parhamdoustdar.com/2016/04/03/tools-of-blind- pro...](https://www.parhamdoustdar.com/2016/04/03/tools-of-blind-programmer/)

Hope this can help.

</comment><comment><USER55> I am planning to work by blinding myself (covering my eyes) everyday for half an hour - starting one of these days. Though I am not immediately planning to work on software for the blind, I might get some inspiration to do so in future with this exercise.

</comment><comment><USER56> Not blind, but interested!

</comment><comment><USER57> Have you heard of the BATS group and mailing list?

[http://bats.fyi/](http://bats.fyi/)

<comment><AUTHOR> No, but I have now. Very cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I am sighted, but I am a developer (primarily web) and I'd like to help. Is there room for people like me?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, shoot me an email (in my profile) and I can invite you to the Google Group.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Sighted person here. I'm very interested in this question. Most developers I know are not considering accessibility as part of the intrinsic design of an app. Blind people are more keenly aware of this problem, unfortunately, because it affects them a little more directly. Accessibility to screen reading clients is considered a "good to have," nonessential, an optimization. And yet when you ask the same people if search engine optimization is considered a "good to have," many will laugh and say no, that it is a necessity, if for no other reason than their clients demand it.

Clients want sites that implement current SEO best practices. What sort of best practices are those? A Yoast SEO plugin, maybe. Developers often mention the URL structure of the site itself, say it's "clean." This might be appreciated by future admins of the site, but it's unrelated to the goal of making pages that can be scraped.

It surprises me developers and SEOs overlook the difficulty of scraping the web. Keyword density does very little to help a page that cannot easily be serialized to a database. It's true that machines have come a long way. Google sees text loaded into the DOM dynamically, for example. But its algorithms remain deeply skeptical of ( or maybe just confused by ) pages I've made that make a lot of hot changes to the DOM.

And why wouldn't it be? I ask myself how would I cope with a succession of before and after states, identify conflicts, and merge all those objects into a cached image. Badly, sure. At this point, summarizing what the page "says" is no longer a deterministic function of the static page. Perhaps machine learning algorithms of the future will more and more resemble riveting court dramas where various mappings are proposed, compared to various procedural precedents, and rejected until a verdict is reached.

I wasn't very good at SEO. I found web scrapers completely fascinating, I spent way more time reading white papers on Google Research and trying to build a homemade facsimile of Google. Come to think of it, I did very little actual work. But I took a lot of useful lessons that have served me well as a developer.

I realized, for example, how many great websites there are that are utterly inaccessible to the visually impaired. With very few exceptions, these sites inhabit this sort of "gray web," unobservable to the vast majority of the world's eyeballs. The difficulty of crawling the web isn't simply related to the difficulty of summarizing a rich, interactive, content experience. They are instances of the same problem. If I really wanted to know how my site's SEO stacks up against the competition, I would not hire an SEO to tell me, I would hire a blind person.

</comment><comment><USER60> I'd like to help.

</comment><comment><USER61> > I'm looking at you Chrome Dev Tools...

Puns aside, Who on earth would make a blind person work on UI? I think it's better that you parted with them, even tho I'm sorry you have trouble finding a good job.

Best of luck.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm a blind programmer. I'm currently working on the Rust compiler [0] and a large library for 3D audio that is essentially desktop WebAudio [1]. I'm the kind of person who people often ask for help with their college classes because I went through everything without trouble and came out of college with a 3.9 GPA, and the only reason I'm not making significant amounts of money at the moment is that I have other health problems that I won't go into here (but I would trade with someone who is only blind in a heartbeat). I think I am qualified to say that this is a bad idea.

Firstly, just offhand, the following stacks should be fully accessible with current tools: Node.js, Rust, Python, truly cross-platform C++, Java, Scala, Ruby, PHP, Haskell, and Erlang. If you use any of these, you can work completely from a terminal, access servers via SSH through Cygwin or Bash for Windows, and do editing via an SFTP client (WinSCP works reasonably, at least with NVDA). Notepad++ also makes a perfectly adequate editor, again with NVDA; I'm not sure about jaws if you're using that.

GitHub has a command line tool called hub that can be used to do some things, and is otherwise pretty accessible. Not perfect, but certainly usable enough that NVDA (one of the most popular screen readers) uses it now. Many other project management systems have command line tools as well. If you write alternatives to project management tools, you will have to convince your employer to use them. Replacing these makes you less employable. You need to work to make them accessible, perhaps by getting a job on an accessibility team.

The stacks you are locked out of--primarily anything Microsoft and anything iOS--can only be fixed with collaboration from the companies backing them. Writing a wrapper or alternative to msbuild that can let you do a UWP app without using the GUI is not feasible. I have looked into this. Doing this for Xcode is even worse, because Xcode is a complicated monster that doesn't bother to document anything--Microsoft doesn't document much, but at least gives you some.

I imagine this is not what you want to hear, but separating all the blind people into the corner and requiring custom tools for everything will just put us all out of work. if you're successful, none of the mainstream stuff that cares even a little right now will continue to do so, and you'll end up working on blind-person-only teams at blind-person-only companies.

0: My most notable Rust PR is this monster: [https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/pull/36151](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/36151) 1: [https://github.com/camlorn/libaudioverse](https://github.com/camlorn/libaudioverse)

<comment><AUTHOR> If this is directed at me, I don't think I'm arguing to put blind developers in a corner. The tools that could be developed could either be new or improvements on existing tools. The latter sounds like your preference, but I don't think it is the only viable option. I can envision a whole suite of tools that, while targeting blind developers, could enhance their abilities or even just make what was otherwise inaccessible accessible.

A possible analogy might be crossing a busy intersection. Someone made pedestrian cross signs audible, allowing a pedestrian to know what the walk sign says at any given time. But this is an enhancement of a pre-existing technology. That blind pedestrian will still likely require a white cane, a blind person specific tool, in order to cross the street. I think there's room for both in software development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I'm almost completely blind in one due to an eye condition and would be interested in being involved.</comment>


Facebook Services Down - <AUTHOR> All Facebook services (Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram) are down. <comment><USER2> Weird that it's happening again. I wonder what infrastructure changes they're making to presumably cause this?

</comment><comment><USER3> Down for me also in Romania, Eastern-Europe, not sure if it's region- dependent.

</comment><comment><USER4> It happens a lot lately. Whats wrong? Anyone have inside information?

</comment><comment><USER5> It seems to be back up. Reporting from Central Europe.

</comment><comment><USER6> Back up for me on the East Coast of the USA.</comment>


Redcar: It's time for a Ruby editor (in Ruby) [video] - <AUTHOR> http://confreaks.net/videos/428-rubyconf2010-it-s-time-for-a-ruby-editor

<comment><AUTHOR> I brought up my desire for a good ruby editor in ruby previously in an HN comment and got some "why would you want that?" responses. I hope watching this, people might get a glimpse of why I think this is awesome.

edit: I installed it and it seems pretty nice so far. All it really needs for me to pledge my undying love is a built-in debugger, and that is on the roadmap. Oh, and perhaps some git integration (as opposed to SVN).

</comment><comment><USER2> I've never understood the desire to have specialized editors for a specific language. If you want to go to a full blown IDE thats one thing - Eclipse and Visual Studio are powerful tools - but if you want to _edit_ code efficiently I don't understand why you wouldn't learn one editor very well and use it for all languages.

I personally am a vim guy but emacs, textmate, whatever, would be fine and they all work with clojure, ruby, python, c, and whatever the language du jour is tomorrow too.

Not that this isn't cool and I don't fault them for scratching a personal itch - its just an itch I don't have.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I don't understand why you wouldn't learn one editor very well and use it > for all languages.

If ruby is your preferred language, you could do that with Redcar, and enjoy the process of extending the editor.

<comment><USER2> This is very true and a valid point. If I didn't already know vim it would be a compelling argument for sure - but as I've already invested the time to learn it and it supports plugins written in ruby anyways there just isn't reason enough to switch for me. However - for someone who isn't already invested in an editor that wants that type of flexibility and wants to write extensions in ruby - this could very well be a winner!

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually that is the situation I'm in. I was just about to jump into emacs after working mainly with Netbeans, and failing to make the switch to vim, but this actually looks really appealing to me.

<comment><USER3> You probably tried the no arrows method of switching to Vim. A piece of advice, just use it. Try to learn a few movements and commands each day as you need them, but keep using the editor as you used to use any other editor until you've learned enough of Vim. Baby steps and a week or two into it you will start to wonder how you lived without it.

<comment><USER4> This was not my experience. After a few months of Vim use, I was reasonably proficient. I timed myself doing basic editing tasks in both Vim (using keyboard motions) and Gedit (using the mouse). I was significantly faster in Gedit.

Double-click to select a word, triple-click to select a line. Just start typing to replace selected text. No conflation of cutting a string in to the clipboard and deleting it. Click-and-type editing is nice. I only use Vim when I want to reformat text with its macros.

<comment><USER3> I don't mean to be rude or patronizing (it's not my intention at all), but if you found getting the mouse and triple clicking to select a line instead of using 'Shift + V', and double clicking to select a word instead of something like 've', you where probably doing something very wrong. I realize that Vim is not for everyone, but to say you can be faster than what you could be in Vim using the mouse and Gedit sounds like total heresy to me! If you told me that you don't just don't like modal editors or that you where uncomfortable with the concept of motions and preferred the mouse - that would be the end of it and I would just acknowledge that (once again) Vim is not for everyone, but from what I read you never really got to a point where you where proficient enough with the editor to get significant ease and speed.

I've done the timing also and in some cases I've found that Vim gets me to where I want to be orders of magnitude faster, but seldom (if not ever) have I found it to be slower than a regular editor, perhaps with the exception of the most basic of basic editing needs (and even then Vim is probably faster).

<comment><USER4> Yes, but to use those Vim commands your cursor already has to be at the right place. The main thing that slowed me down with Vim was moving my cursor to the right place, not executing commands. Having a mouse makes it dead easy to move your cursor to the right place. I only gave double-clicking and triple- clicking as examples because I think clicking and dragging to highlight might be what slows down many click-and-type editor users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I tried an early version, it sucked up entirely too much RAM for an app that is supposed to be simple. Hundreds of megs. I assume this is down to the JVM + the JRuby runtime.

As someone wanting 'a better textmate,' I see much more hope in <http://kodapp.com>, though it isn't cross-platform (it depends on OSX's Cocoa framework.) The early beta is already very impressive, especially the neatness of its codebase.

And no, this isn't the place to go recommending (vim|emacs). We get it.

<comment><USER6> Except Kod doesn't really do anything much yet ;) I think we're stuck with Textmate (which rocks for what it's worth).

<comment><USER5> That's because the devs are mainly interested right now in hacking the text parser and the associated low level stuff that makes an app really good in the long run. This is what makes me so hopeful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hmmm, it seems that it runs on JRuby.

</comment><comment><USER8> kinda like the Python IDE in Python that people have been dreaming about as long as there has been Python?

<comment><USER9> However Redcar it is also compatible with texmate bundles. So it is more like emacs.

<comment><USER10> don't mean to nitpick but textmate bundle support doesn't an emacs make.

redcars extensibility and openness make it more like emacs.

<comment><USER9> Yes, however the point I was making was more simple: a better emacs, but respecting what emacs created: texmate. A better texmate, but respecting what texmate created: redcar. But if you are nitpicking, it is not as simple, and at this moment it is more like a promise. But you are right that redcar and emacs have a more similar philosophy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Unfortunately, it depends on jRuby.

<comment><AUTHOR> The install was seamless and keeps that out of your way. Is there some other (large) objection I'm missing that makes JRuby an issue?

<comment><USER11> Annoying to have such a big new dependency when I'm using Ruby 1.9.2 for everything else Ruby-related. Would make more sense to me to use a Ruby editor if it actually ran on the mainstream Ruby interpreter and not jRuby.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Has anyone tried the ruby editor (previously called ver) by Michael Fellinger. It now uses Ruby Tk. I cannot recall the name. (Just tried searching, but could not find it).</comment>


Show HN: Lecture Hunt – Like Hacker News but for learning material - <AUTHOR> http://lecturehunt.com/ <comment><USER2> Actually... I hate the implication that learning can be helped by videos... I see VERY little written content... Especially for engineering and physics...

</comment><comment><USER3> It's a nice resource that I have been trying out. Very complete and useful. The only thing missing is real and good content. So, hopefully you get more attention and track so people start using it!</comment>


Horse, petrified but still harnessed, discovered in Pompeii - <AUTHOR> https://www.kare11.com/mobile/article/news/nation-now/horse-petrified-but-still-harnessed-discovered-in-pompeii-might-have-belonged-to-military-general/465-bf305b20-698f-4f52-a848-8c7fcee08922 <comment><USER2> I get access denied

<comment><USER3> Same for the poor horse.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A standardised REST idea - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/richthegeek/STD-Rest

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

Reading the results of [http://blog.yourtrove.com/2011/08/11/api-integration- pain-su...](http://blog.yourtrove.com/2011/08/11/api-integration-pain-survey- results/) felt like a good time to post one of my recent projects to HN.

The library takes a standard format JSON which details the methods/structure of an API and resolves it into libraries of multiple languages (currently PHP, Javascript).

I'm not sure /if/ it's a good idea yet, and I still haven't figured out how to handle authentication schemas (although hooks + per-language*schema solves it, it increases the work load).

Comments, thoughts, criticism - all appreciated.</comment>