phantomread

You might already know this but niche conferences are part of some larger marketing strategies. Seeing conferences for a product can add legitimacy in the minds of people who are shopping for solutions. But over time I've realized there's more to it, almost an Inception-like quality to a lot of conference topics.

A company I worked for had a whole division dedicated to inventing conferences around products or ideas that other companies wanted to promote. A great example are conferences where there are talks on cloud-based tools. The speakers don't just go up there and say "go buy compute from vendor X". Instead, everything is structured around how to use (often free) tools or techniques that ultimately require investment in "compute or storage from vendor X".

Another, more abstract, example is a conference on programming languages or frameworks. These are great places to push ideas about "the new way" or "the right way" to do something that happen to include something you're selling. I've seen conferences make attendees into low-level developer evangelists. Those people went back to their companies to endorse programming languages and architectures that had a lot of support from particular vendors, and the cycle was complete. It may seem a bit hand-wavy the way I've explained it, but I've seen it work.

My point is, conferences may cost a lot to put on but have quite a few obscured benefits that you have to price in when considering if they're worth it.

Ironically if you hit the “Raw” button near the top of the GitHub file view then the resulting plaintext is nicely wrapped on (my) mobile.

It also helps when trying to put limits on greedy users or maintain a ban-list. Attribution is also important, like you said. Granted, an abusive user could just keep creating new keys, but if they require something like email verification then it's a little bit costlier to circumvent than nothing.

EDIT: Based on other comments, there's no email verification.

I wonder if they meant “for the stray dog population”, specifically.

Just checked using a camera and you're right; a person right around "conversation distance" from the camera focusing at 35mm looks pretty natural in frame for a video call. It sounds like I underestimated modern continuous autofocus. Great info from you and the sibling comments, thanks.

Amateur photographer looking to learn more here. My initial impression is that a 35mm focal length on a full-frame/35mm film equivalent sensor would have a relatively _wide_ field of view (FOV). Or do I have that backwards?

My other thought is that the suggested lens can stop down to f1.8, which would give a nice narrow depth of field (DOF) and add a pleasant background blur, but it would also be harder to stay in focus during a call. If the person on camera moves forward or backward very much at all when the lens is at f1.8, they would be pretty blurry. So perhaps they could get away with a lens that just stops down to f2.8 or so, albeit with worse low-light performance (smaller aperture, less light coming through).

But take these comments with a grain of salt. It sounds like you have a setup that works well for you.

Biggest issue I can think of is trying to do PWM _and_ WiFi work simultaneously on an esp8266. If you have, say, an esp8266 serving up a small webpage for control and don't want to add an external PWM board then you might notice intermittent issues. This is more obvious if you're controlling something like a lighting ballast that's PWM controlled.

Of course now that I'm looking around I see https://github.com/khoih-prog/ESP8266_PWM which seems promising (subdivides the second of two available hardware timers to allow PWM that isn't sensitive to other running code). So there's multiple workarounds (libraries, breakout boards) besides upgrading to an esp32.

On that note, TIL about screen reader issues related to dialogs in general, including this built-in. Seems like the question is primarily around how to update the focus target from the "invoking element" to the dialog's content in a reader-friendly way. There's a linked post from the MDN docs with more detail https://www.scottohara.me/blog/2019/03/05/open-dialog.html#i.... They actually still recommend a custom implementation that's considered more robust when used with screen readers: https://github.com/KittyGiraudel/a11y-dialog. I'm glad there's a callout on the MDN docs as I would have assumed this dialog element is screen reader clean. Focus management is always a tough thing regardless.

Once it became a target, the precision of the term was at risk. Especially if you consider that the ability to redefine "what it means to be sustainable" is a means to greenlight high-value projects or grease the skids on large purchases of materials or services. You've correctly pointed out that use of the term "sustainable" is not sustainable.

I realize documentation is only half the battle but I get a lot from using something like explainshell when I see unknown argument lists: https://explainshell.com/explain?cmd=nmap+-Pn+-sT+-p-+--min-...

This way you can read the full command sort of like a custom pamphlet. To your point, more context beyond the manpage is always helpful.

I agree with your point on investing in a good IDE. In the Jetbrains family, a game changer for me was "tapping the shift key twice in quick succession". This brings up an input box that can fuzzy-find classes/structs, files, "symbols" (methods, constants), git branches, and kick off IDE actions like refactoring. If enabled, you can even find database tables, functions, and commands that were pulled from the project's datasources. Sort of a combination between macOS' spotlight and Emacs dwim-style operations (short for "do what I mean"). You can use tab once the input appears to switch what type of thing it searches for.

This feature has saved me a lot of time for some IDE features I don't use often enough to have memorized a keyboard shortcut. It's the same overlay that appears if you hit CTRL-N (CMD-N on macOS) to search for classes/structs project wide.

I like your idea and agree that implementing it would improve outcomes for customers. However, the ISP would be on the hook for additional customer support; it's a lot more involved to outfit your call center staff with playbooks for explaining exploited devices to an average customer than it is to toss in a semi-autonomous blocker. This does make things worse for "power users", but ISPs may have also found that said users are more willing to pay for special service agreements (a small business account for example).

I might be misunderstanding but doesn't the feature also help prevent home users' devices becoming part of a DDOS effort (high number of outbound connections)? There's stories here on HN about IoT devices and infected PCs/phones participating in DDOS on command. So I can see an argument that a home gateway device should try and help prevent participation by devices behind it.

In Chicago I believe “commuter rail” almost always refers to Metra.

If you’re on an i-device then reader view in safari (or other browsers) works well to get around the scrolling issue. Ditto for Android.

Definitely an instance of "to each their own" for me, starting a project in Audacity was refreshingly straightforward the first time I tried it. The non-destructive effect stacking mentioned in the video sounds pretty awesome.

The project you mentioned seems nice and clean, but looks like it's Linux only (specifically GTK2 only). For me that would limit the ability to share editing projects with others way too much, since so many are on Windows. Also, the 8 track limit might be frustrating for musicians.

This doesn't change the point you're making, but thankfully it was only 9/134 people according to the article's tagline. The mix of the word "nine" and the number "134" makes it hard to spot