joahua

Totally agree, within Ebay-world.

My point was just that novice buyers have no conception that 'bad' doesn't mean what it means in the rest of the world. Maybe eBay need another level -- "Vindictive", say? ;-)

The notion that negative feedback ought somehow only be posted in event of egregious misdescription is a bizarre, Ebay-centric one.

It was a bad customer experience - of course her response is negative!

eBay have designed it this way, but many users probably aren't aware of the consequences of leaving feedback.

You'd write a complaint card in a hotel with nary a second thought and no ill consequences. To be sued for what appears to be the same thing online is at best a gross overreaction.

I work for a large media organization and we have the ability to suspend advertising in response to crisis events. I'd assume other major outlets would have equivalent capabilities.

At the end of the day advertisers don't want to be associated with certain stories, and there's a public good imperative that drives rapid, open access in these tragic situations that overrides commercial interest even if that were of concern.

How does this compare to clarity.fm?

These are often too narrow and end with your face in the screen. I've apparently got perfect vision but had difficulty focusing when I attempted such a setup using standard-depth shelving.

Usually? Which ATs are you describing? We care about this sort of thing and weren't aware of that constraint - a quick Google doesn't highlight any obvious issues with Jaws or NVDA, except for this [1] in 2003. But since then there have been huge changes in assistive tech - pretty sure the whole ARIA thing didn't exist back then, and there's probably more choice in ATs now than ever before.

1. http://www.velocityreviews.com/forums/t155840-nesting-inside...

It's been nearly six years of free. That's pretty gradual strong-arming.

Note that per user limits continue to apply, so people have as much incentive as they ever did to upgrade, plus for any new domains/projects people will naturally either migrate to other options (then consolidate services around these, moving themselves off Google) or start paying.

Not convinced there's any need for hostility on either side.

Price anchoring / gimmicks for lower tiers? The idea is cool enough to reward on its own, but if you can reward it and get stuff, well, that might push a few up a tier.

My (outsider's, totally unprivileged) understanding of Google's traffic data is that they combine official trip-time data in partnership with road authorities with realtime data from Google Maps users.

If true, they've already got data without a dongle required.

The load/unload dwell time would impact the service's efficiency - sometimes it's better to have more low density vessels than fewer large ones. It's largely a function of the journey time, though.

The impact this makes on perceived speed is impressive.

However, a word of caution. We tried this for a while and found it interfered with scrolling behaviour on link-heavy pages, not to mention making event capture for swipeable elements difficult.

The technique is a useful one to be aware of, but I'd be wary of using a library for this - it didn't work out for us, and I'll hazard it is unlikely to work as well it initially appears to.

That initial 300ms speedup is astounding, though :)

It's in the footer… on the homepage, but only scarcely. http://www.apple.com/uk/

Oh, come on. As someone who's developed for both platforms, and worked with plenty of other devs (who ought to neither be ignorant nor prejudicial about the situation at hand as their job depends upon it) make quips of this sort all the time. Android is near-exclusively the target of their mirth.

This leaves irrelevance, perhaps, but given the context of this thread I'd argue it's not that either.

You're right that PNG optimizers will yield better results, but PNG8 isn't the same in both products.

Photoshop won't do 8 bit opacity (as opposed to hard transparency), whereas Fireworks will.

Love this article. As someone who builds mobile websites for a news organization (not the BBC, but prominent in my country) the prospect of properly assessing a website in terms of its global accessiblity is daunting but incredibly exciting.

The 'why should I care' question is writ large in a community of people obsessed with growth and efficiency — but, as much as I appreciate those aspects of HN's culture, assessing site performance on low quality devices provides a great opportunity to reach for the 'universal access' the web promises.

In part this is probably due to discrepancies in the performance of Safari vs. UIWebView browsers. Apple require a different JS engine due to sandboxing concerns in native app contexts - apparently it benchmarks to around 1/3 the performance.

There's a webkit bug that is pertinent here.

We can't accelerate animation on a mobile app that uses position:fixed for persistent headers due to http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=20574

This makes for some jerky transitions, unfortunately, but the alternative is forgoing the simplicity and performance afforded by position:fixed for persistent nav.

If in doubt, download and turn flight mode on before running, then uninstall?

Xmen?

Search replace? :)

Agree that if you've got well defined color variables setup the preprocessor route is potentially simpler.

I don't think the author's suggesting GoDaddy purchase every domain, but it'd be reasonable to think they might determine the relative value of domains to purchase based on search volumes. Dubiously ethical, but technically straightforward and a simple enough numbers game on the business side.

I dunno - obviously different projects diverge on required backwards compatibility (Python 2/3?), but SSH isn't called Telnet v2.

For something as fundamental as HTTP the author argues changes need to be radical to drive adoption, but at the same time there's not necessarily wide-spread impetus to do so if the burden is too high. This is engineering on a 15 year time-scale, which I feel a little young (at 24) to well comprehend!

It's not just apps in the web-app sense, but user agents (all the way down to embedded systems) that would need changing to take advantage of the 'sufficient benefits'. That's a pretty massive undertaking.

Not sure whether you were aware of this, but CCTV are a real network - it's China's state owned TV company, which also produces global and English language content - so saying you're from a global TV network is probably not that blink-worthy.

Wouldn't there be contention issues around writes to EBS in this case? I know very little about this, but I keep hearing about EC2's relatively poor IO performance and imagine that there would be a big fat traffic jam if every running instance received a signal to get their house in order before filesystems are forcibly unmounted.

Relatively high. Also from east coast AU latency is better to west coast US than much of Asia in my experience. We just got AWS cloudfront in Aus which might serve as a decent barometer for the relative cost of bandwidth: http://aws.amazon.com/pricing/cloudfront/

Also, if you're unfamiliar with CSS generally, the 'conventional' approach (as opposed to img tags in markup, or characters in an icon font) would be to use a sprite. This is also advantageous from a frontend performance standpoint as you avoid additional network overhead in getting individual graphics down to the client.

That is strictly true, but I've possibly found a way around this and have posted a CC licensed version (the most open I was able to find) on GitHub accordingly. https://github.com/joahua/AusPostcode

The idea behind vendor prefixes is that they are implementations of ideas before conventions have been established. When two vendors implement something simultaneously but pre-spec, it's hard to tell which one will end up being canonical.

Your general convention is probably good, but in 5 years time when n parameters have ended up in your {additional} parameter, people will ask why that, too, doesn't follow a convention. The answer is definitionally that the convention doesn't exist yet, and the vendor prefix is a step on the way to establishing one.

Nevermind the part where it's an Android clone (isn't it?).

It seems that time after time domestic (Chinese) businesses trump foreign competitors - but they're hardly operating from a position of strength. The fund is privately held (murky though ownership can be in China) and Alibaba's been pretty successful on a global scale, so perhaps they do know what they're doing!

Have any YC alumni (as individuals or businesses) made significant inroads into China? It's an area of great personal interest and would love to hear your stories.

We do, but have found - particularly in IE variants - that performance is so haltingly slow that we may as well not bother lazyloading at all.

There are also some Flash of Unstyled Content/Unloaded JS issues - but we should probably fix this on our end. The challenge with that is Facebook have the freedom to change iframe dimensions at any point, thus breaking thousands of pages again.