It's a bit surprising to me that my comment above is the top Google Search result for "pro-user design". I'm surprised both because Google has indexed the comment within 10 minutes and also because I would have expected the term to have been used quite a lot already.
I just registered the domain for my first web development company, https://prouserdesign.com. History in the making! Perhaps this might turn out to be one of those threads that gets reposted to HN years later after a successful IPO... haha.
Another meme covering an (at least slightly) overlapping set of guidelines/ideas is "humane technology". Not saying it's the same thing as what all of you mean, but we shouldn't forget that our tools impact non-users as well (i.e. people who never used Uber feel its impact still).
I think that good web developers and agencies can probably really pick and choose their clients as well, and they probably don't like to waste time entertaining numerous "potential" clients who after 3 hours of listing all the custom features they'll require, look shocked and disgusted when presented with a cost estimate.
I am still learning web dev but my guess would be that there probably just isn't a very big market for custom webdev agencies anymore, due to social media like Instagram and Facebook pages acting as de facto websites for many businesses, as well as generally most businesses being happy enough with a basic, and relatively inexpensive, website using a Wordpress templates (of which there are of course many to choose from). That's just my guess anyway.
And to add onto this, an old acquaintance ran into me quite a while ago and we got to talking about web dev and he said he wanted me to make a website for him and asked "How much?" I said $500 (he really was just an old acquaintance and not a friend) and he balked at that figure (quite rudely actually). I think a lot of people probably think "Well I can make a Squarespace website myself so it can't be that hard, time-consuming or expensive..." and they probably don't know enough to know that their Squarespace website kind of sucks.
Indeed. I still feel like there must be some sort of agency somewhere that will do this type of work though. It might cost a pretty penny, but it can't be impossible to find..
Probably one of the more relevant usernames to comment on my post :)
I have the feeling that you're right; there just isn't a market for it. The alternative would be to try and filter through the army of Fiverr, Upwork & Freelancer - but I fear the risk of spaghetti code or copypasta is high and there isn't much accountability on these platforms once the job is considered 'done'. Maybe I'm wrong though.
I'd advise you to stay well away from Fiverr based on my past experiences (as a buyer, not a freelancer) especially for something as big as a custom web development project. It's been a few years since I've been on the site though so perhaps it's changed (but I doubt it). I haven't used either of the other two.
There are many proficient web developers who I'm sure could do a great job of whatever it is you are looking to build, and would be happy to build it to your specifications (like using Node for the backend).
I could be wrong, but I think it's likely that good independent web developers don't need to advertise because they probably already have full-time jobs or contract work via recruitment or word of mouth.
And I think that probably applies even more to good web dev agencies - they likely have enough work via word of mouth referrals and those little "Website made by Super Web Design" links in footers that they really don't need to advertise.
Here on HN? Maybe on Reddit? Although again, I'd be surprised if there's many very good web developers advertising on or looking for work there.
I have hired somebody on Reddit for a small job before (an illustration) and could not have been more impressed by the job they did. And I was really surprised by how little it cost, too - I'm not a wealthy person (currently a student) but I still paid them more than we had agreed on, because I felt like they deserved it.
What exactly are you looking to build? Could you perhaps put an email address in your bio and I could reach out and discuss it with you? I may not be experienced enough (although I'm familiar with Node) but I do have friends who are very proficient web developers (which is how I got into it). One of my close friends has been the CTO of multiple well-funded companies and I know he uses Node a lot.
This friend also developed a well-known web technology and somehow remains more humble about that achievement than I am about winning a spelling bee in 7th grade.
I don't believe he's currently looking for work (although I guess I could check) but he is a very friendly and generous person who is always willing to help people, and either he or I might be able to help point you in the right direction.
I guess what I'm saying is that if nobody else steps forward, I could be your ear in the business, if you're a reasonable person who would respect my time, which you do seem to be.
And I do really want to emphasize that I'd recommend staying away from Fiverr or any similar gig marketplaces for a bigger job like this. If it was just a simple website using Wordpress or some other CMS, I'd probably roll the dice, because, well working with Wordpress isn't exactly rocket science. But there's so many ways a developer could screw up building a custom website with a Node backend, and you might end up paying $$$$ for something you throw in the trash.
OT but when I open an article like this in Firefox's reader view, it often displays each image twice, first a blurry version and then the actual image. This is frustrating when I want to print a long article from reader view as I have to go through and delete all the blurry duplicate images first using developer tools (given that I don't want to waste ink or paper). Is there a better way I can fix or work around this?
I'm also interested because, as my username implies, I'm learning web dev and I would like to ensure if possible that any websites I make don't have this issue for people wanting to print pages from them.
He is probably aware that other Facebook employees can crack into Whatsapp traffic at will. It might be unwise to be caught doing it to his account; and probably best to make it look like it was somebody else doing it.
Obviously I have no way to show you Facebook proprietary source code, but equally obviously Facebook can make their code do anything they like, including MITMing on an account-by-account basis.
That is always true when all the code in use is controlled by a single closed organization.
Nope, just an expectation that sweeping claims get backed up either by reasoning (like you just did) or a source
As for your reasoning vs your claim: you had made it seem like there was some well-known flaw or tool within FB to disable/intercept E2E. Or that we should expect an E2E-disabler functionality already exists.
I'm no FB developer, but I doubt it's as simple as one or two rogue developers adding in an "intercept mark's messages" functionality.
> That is always true when all the code in use is controlled by a single closed organization.
Fair enough, but FB/whatsapp messengers are probably some of the most scrutinized by third parties, as well as developers who would sooner or later blow the whistle (would hope so anyway). I would not take "mark is on signal so his messengers suck" to be a reasonable conclusion - and I'm not even FB's biggest fan.
Do you imagine it is even possible that FB has not yet been served a National Security letter demanding backdoor access, on demand, to any WA account of the spooks' choice? Or that there would be any technical difficulty in complying with such an order?
I don't know what an "overlay" is, but how vulnerable am I as an amateur web developer to being sued because a website I build is inaccessible to some users? Of course I want to make my websites accessible, but I also don't really want to be sued because I made a mistake.
Generally nobody will START with a lawsuit, they will poke @ you/the owner of the website and say hey, X doesn't work for users Y(some group of people needing accessibility). If the owner/you are a total meanie pants, THEN they might threaten a lawsuit, maybe a strongly worded letter from a lawyer. Only after that, will they MAYBE proceed with an actual lawsuit.
Why? Lawsuits are expensive, a bug-report is 100% easier :)
So if you listen to your bug reports about accessibility, the chances of being sued are near zero. Assuming you DO get sued first, if you fix the issue before the court date, chances are you won't even have to show up, but even if you do have to show up in the court date, they won't be able to show standing anymore, and the case will get dismissed. (Assuming you actually fixed the issue)
> right now it's a terrible environment with no real way to avoid speculative lawsuits from ambulance chasing firms.
I was a bit concerned because of this part, but now upon re-reading I suppose Austin was referring to large companies with lots of money, not amateur web developers.
> Generally nobody will START with a lawsuit, they will poke @ you/the owner of the website and say hey, X doesn't work for users Y(some group of people needing accessibility)
And I would really appreciate that because I don't want anything I build to be inaccessible to people with disabilities.
>Why? Lawsuits are expensive, a bug-report is 100% easier :)
Your statement assumes a world where only a well-intentioned 1st-party disabled person retains a lawyer and pays them by-the-hour to file lawsuits but the above examples of twisted financial motives flips that assumption around. The speculative-lawsuit type of lawyers are not motivated by filing bug reports.
Yes, there are real disabled people that are genuinely blocked by non-compliant websites which can be fixed. But simultaneously, there are also bad actors out there.
You obviously are not wrong, but I was responding to the question, and for small-time websites, what I said is generally going to be true.
These surf-by lawsuits are still after 1 thing, $$$$'s. The chances of a lone developer website like the questioner having serious dollars available for a lawyer to come try and take are pretty low.
These surf-by lawsuits are generally after the big companies that have $$'s floating around ready for the taking. This person as a lone developer will almost certainly not have the problem. If they did have that problem(enough money a lawyer would be interested), hopefully they are properly insured and firewall their assets off from the taking, assuming worst-case and they lose, which is very much not a given.
Bad actors exist everywhere in every corner of the world and are always looking for an edge to exploit. That they are trying to take advantage of the ADA now isn't surprising.
Hehe, but still, it is a very funny remark and it points to a large assumption in the gggp: that all boats will float. They do, right up until you smash them into icebergs and such.
On a technicality such an event changes their density considerably, assuming we take that to mean 'everything inside the volume circumscribed by the hull', after all, whether you insert all that water through a hole in the front or in the top doesn't really matter, as long as the air gets displaced that will do the job nicely.
Yup, that's what I meant although it is not exactly "volume of the hull". The boat density should be something like "density as you would calculate it for any solid object" plus "all air below the water line". So solid parts always count and air only counts if its below the water line.
This way Titanic counts as just a heap of steel (and doesn't float) and Ever Given counts as steel-air mix (and floats).
Even in normal operations the canal is being dredged continually, since it's basically a channel dug into sand that's continually dissolving in the water. Check out the cross sections here: it's much wider and more shallow (gradient up to 4:1) than you might think.
As somebody who is just getting into learning Python for web development and ML, am I better off switching to Julia right now? How steep is the learning curve compared to Python, and does it have a framework similar to Django for building web apps?
IMHO, no, stick with Python. Of course you can fiddle with Julia but Python is used in many fronts and much more versatile.
If Python were a blocker for the adoption and development of ML, it wouldn't be the default language of the most popular ML libs.
The reason is, the high performant code is written in C++/C/Fortran. Python is just used to glue everything and provide a nice and rich interface. That's what really matters.
To me Julia is more to Fortran than Python. And it doesn't have many usages outside numeric programming.
Scapping the Web, building rest APIs, Performing Data Analysis, Automation scripts is much easier in Python than Julia or Swift.
Two years ago when I started experimenting with Julia and the Flux DL library, I paused to code up non numerical problems in Julia: web scraping, making REST calls, SPARQL queries, build simple web site, etc. Julia was OK for all of these tasks.
I am going to watch Julia adoption, and use it more, when and if it becomes more popular.
> To me Julia is more to Fortran than Python. And it doesn't have many usages outside numeric programming.
Again, you're making unsubstantiated claims.
> Python is just used to glue everything and provide a nice and rich interface. That's what really matters.
So, now I have to not only learn Python but also Fortran/C++/C because the underlying library that I might want to adapt is written in one of these languages. In Julia the DL library, for example, is written in Julia. What you are claiming is a pro is actually a con.
> Scapping the Web, building rest APIs, Performing Data Analysis, Automation scripts is much easier in Python than Julia or Swift.
That might be true for Swift, but certainly not for Julia.
So, now I have to not only learn Python but also Fortran/C++/C because the underlying library that I might want to adapt is written in one of these languages.
Basically the only time you'll want to do this from Python is if there is specific Fortran or C++ library you want to use. You'd have to do the same in Swift or Julia in this case.
Only if the library is not written in Julia, yes. The point here is that Julia is efficient enough that deep learning libraries can be written in pure Julia, not C/C++/Fortran.
And yet... no widely used DL library is in Julia, and they are all in Python.
It's kind of a silly point to try to score: "it's possible to write an efficient deep learning library in Julia (although no one has done it yet), and yes, you can do the same in Numpy in Python, and XLA in Python will outpeform it, but someone else wrote some C/C++ there to make that possible!"
You are much more likely to want to write CUDA kernels (in C!) than you are to write C framework code to interface with Python for machine learning.
The person is looking to "get into ML". I've been working as a professional ML developer for 6 years, and I've never written any C or C++ for it.
This may be generally true (though the benchmarks I've seen show Knet.jl and sometimes Flux.jl on par with TF/PyTorch with a single machine + single GPU), but there are definitely domains where it is categorically not. The most prominent one is neural *DEs, where the SciML [1] ecosystem has SOTA performance. You can really see Python/C++-based frameworks struggle here because they have slow "glue code" and don't (one could argue can't effectively) optimize for latency. That's not a problem for most CV models and transformers, but really stunts research into more dynamic approaches.
Those aren't needed, but they are options. "he templated implementation allows arbitrary array and number types to be compatible, giving compatibility with arbitrary precision floating point numbers, GPU-based computations, unit-checked arithmetic, and other features. "
Those are exactly the things wrapping fortran and c won't give you
> So, now I have to not only learn Python but also Fortran/C++/C because the underlying library that I might want to adapt is written in one of these languages. In Julia the DL library, for example, is written in Julia. What you are claiming is a pro is actually a con.
You don't need to learn C/C++ or fortran. I've been working with python and ML for about 4 years and haven't touched any C/C++ or fortran to get work done. I agree that it'd be better if we could do everything with just one language but the truth is that Julia is not that language. It's great for HPC but expressive enough for generic things like Web.
No, use Python. Python is a good choice for web development, and will remain the de-facto choice for ML for the foreseeable future. If you plan on learning both web development and ML, that will be quite enough work without throwing a second language into the mix right away.
Julia might be a good thing to explore once you're up and running.
Don't worry, you will get a lot of good things by learning Python. And when you become comfortable with your first programming language learning new ones will be way faster.
The most important for newcomers is to pick one language and stick with it long enough to know it well (I would advise for a general-purpose programming language such as python). It will take time before you bump into its limits, and when that happen you can start to look around how things are being done in other languages.
If you're just learning, I guess it doesn't really matter. Just don't become one of those people who thinks Python is great because it's the only language they know.
My advice would be to use TensorFlow because it works flawlessly on Google Colab and in Jupyter notebooks.
The latter two are tools to send ML models and training pipelines around, so kind of like Google Docs for AI. Colab is on the internet, Jupyter on your PC.
That way, you can easily exchange your experiments with others and/or asks for help online.
