Tags: kern

10

sparkline

Tuesday, April 28th, 2020

Principles and priorities | Hacker News

I see that someone dropped one of my grenades into the toilet bowl of Hacker News.

Friday, February 22nd, 2019

n-gate.com. we can’t both be right.

Hacker News is an echo chamber focusing on computer posturing and self-aggrandizement. It is run by Paul Graham’s investment fund and sociopath incubator, Y Combinator.

There’s never been any reason to visit Hacker News, but now you really don’t need to ever go there. This site posts a weekly roundup, complete with commentary that’s even more snarky than Hacker News.

Here’s a fairly typical summary of a fairly typical thread:

A programmer at a spamhouse is transported to a world where people are not judged by the color scheme of their Atom window, but by the character assessment and culture fit reports they write about potential new hires. Hackernews spends a lot of time discussing how to bullshit people like the author into hiring them. A few Hackernews struggle with the knowledge that there are people who contribute to business without involving Git. Furious debates about “title inflation” break out amongst people who type javascript into computers and straight-facedly refer to themselves as “engineers”.

Oh, and I love the “about” page.

Wednesday, May 31st, 2017

HN PWA - Hacker News readers as Progressive Web Apps

Of all the sites to pick to demo progressive web apps, we get the cesspit that is Hacker News …I guess it is possible to polish a turd.

Anyway, here are some examples of using frameworks to create alternative Hacker News readers. So the challenge here is to display some text to read..

Four of them render absolutely no content without JavaScript.

In the Hall of Shame we have React, Preact, Angular, and Polymer.

In the Hall of Fame, we have the ones doing it right: React, Vue, and Viper.

That’s right: React appears in both. See, it’s not about the tools; it’s about how you use ‘em.

Saturday, October 29th, 2016

Mapping the Sneakernet – The New Inquiry

When it seems like all our online activity is being tracked by Google, Facebook, and co., it comforts me to think of all the untracked usage out there, from shared (or fake) Facebook accounts to the good ol’ sneakernet:

Packets of information can be distributed via SMS and mobile 3G but also pieces of paper, USB sticks and Bluetooth.

Connectivity isn’t binary. Long live the papernet!

Tuesday, September 30th, 2014

Y Combinator and the negative externalities of Hacker News | Danilo Campos

When I wrote about Reddit and Hacker News, criticising their lack of moderation, civility, and basic decency, many people (invariably men) responded in defence of Reddit. Nobody defended Hacker News. Nobody.

Oh, and all of you people (men) defending Reddit? Here’s your party line …I find it abhorrent.

Sunday, June 15th, 2014

Normal

Here in the UK, there’s a “newspaper”—and I use the term advisedly—called The Sun. In longstanding tradition, page 3 of The Sun always features a photograph of a topless woman.

To anyone outside the UK, this is absolutely bizarre. Frankly, it’s pretty bizarre to most people in the UK as well. Hence the No More Page 3 campaign which seeks to put pressure on the editor of The Sun to ditch their vestigal ’70s sexism and get with the 21st Century.

Note that the campaign is not attempting to make the publication of topless models in a daily newspaper illegal. Note that the campaign is not calling for top-down censorship from press regulators. Instead the campaign asks only that the people responsible reassess their thinking and recognise the effects of having topless women displayed in what is supposedly a family newspaper.

Laura Bates of the Everyday Sexism project has gathered together just some examples of the destructive effects of The Sun’s page 3. And sure, in this age of instant access to porn via the internet, an image of a pair of breasts might seem harmless and innocuous, but it’s the setting for that image that wreaks the damage:

Being in a national newspaper lends these images public presence and, more harmfully for young people, the perception of mainstream cultural approval. Our society, through Page 3, tells both girls and boys ‘that’s what women are’.

Simply put, having this kind of objectification in a freely-available national newspaper normalises it. When it’s socially acceptable to have a publication like The Sun in a workplace, then it’s socially acceptable for that same workplace to have the accompanying air of sexism.

That same kind of normalisation happens in online communities. When bad behaviour is tolerated, bad behaviour is normalised.

There are obvious examples of online communities where bad behaviour is tolerated, or even encouraged: 4Chan, Something Awful. But as long as I can remember, there have also been online communites that normalise abhorrent attitudes, and yet still get a free pass (usually because the site in question would deliver bucketloads of traffic …as though that were the only metric that mattered).

It used to be Slashdot. Then it was Digg. Now it’s Reddit and Hacker News.

In each case, the defence of the bad behaviour was always explained by the sheer size of the community. “Hey, that’s just the way it is. There’s nothing can be done about it.” To put it another way …it’s normal.

But normality isn’t an external phenomenon that exists in isolation. Normality is created. If something is perceived as normal—whether that’s topless women in a national newspaper or threatening remarks in an online forum—that perception is fueled by what we collectively accept to be “normal”.

Last year, Relly wrote about her experience at a conference:

Then there was the one comment I saw in a live irc style backchannel at an event, just after I came off stage. I wish I’d had the forethought to screenshot it or something but I was so shocked, I dropped my laptop on the table and immediately went and called home, to check on my kids.

Why?

Because the comment said (paraphrasing) “This talk was so pointless. After she mentioned her kids at the beginning I started thinking of ways to hunt them down and punish her for wasting my time here.”

That’s a horrible thing for anyone to say. But I can understand how someone would think nothing of making a remark like that …if they began their day by reading Reddit or Hacker News. If you make a remark like that there, nobody bats an eyelid. It’s normal.

So what do we do about that? Do we simply accept it? Do we shrug our shoulders and say “Oh, well”? Do we treat it like some kind of unchangeable immovable force of nature; that once you have a large online community, bad behaviour should be accepted as the default mode of discourse?

No.

It’s hard work. I get that. Heck, I run an online community myself and I know just how hard it is to maintain civility (and I’ve done a pretty terrible job of it in the past). But it’s not impossible. Metafilter is a testament to that.

The other defence of sites like Reddit and Hacker News is that it’s unfair to judge the whole entity based purely on their worst episodes. I don’t buy that. The economic well-being of a country shouldn’t be based on the wealth of its richest citizens—or even the wealth of its average citizens—but its poorest.

That was precisely how Rebecca Watson was shouted down when she tried to address Reddit’s problems when she was on a panel at South by Southwest last year:

Does the good, no matter if it’s a fundraiser for a kid with cancer or a Secret Santa gift exchange, negate the bigotry?

Like I said, running an online community is hardDerek’s book was waaaay ahead of its time—but it’s not impossible. If we treat awful behaviour as some kind of unstoppable force that can’t be dealt with, then what’s the point in trying to have any kind of community at all?

Just as with the No More Page 3 campaign, I’m not advocating legal action or legislative control. Instead, I just want some awareness that what we think of as normal is what we collectively decide is normal.

I try not to be a judgemental person. But if I see someone in public with a copy of The Sun, I’m going to judge them. And no, it’s not a class thing: I just don’t consider misogyny to be socially acceptable. And if you participate in Reddit or Hacker News …well, I’m afraid I’m going to judge you too. I don’t consider it socially acceptable.

Of course my judgemental opinion of someone doesn’t make a blind bit of difference to anybody. But if enough of us made our feelings clear, then maybe slowly but surely, there might be a shift in feeling. There might just be a small movement of the needle that calibrates what we think of normal in our online communities.

Thursday, December 22nd, 2011

Heaven Devoid of Stars – a tale of cross-browser kerning | Clagnut § Browsers · Typography · CSS techniques

Richard dives into the differences in how browsers handle kerning. Be sure to click through to the beautiful finished result.

Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

Fuck yeah Keming!

A celebration of horrendous kerning all over the internet.

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

Kernest.com | @font-face central

Another font-linking service is on the way.

Saturday, February 21st, 2009

FORMation Alliance | KERN

Tetris for type geeks on the iPhone.