News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

zackkatz

Re:Understanding WCAG 2.2 as ePub and PDF on Wednesday August 12, 2026 @11:16AM (#49273733)
Finally! I've been trying to find a single document that has all this.
Disclosure: I'm one of the hosts.

This was one of EmDash's first podcast interviews since launch. A few things that came up that I haven't seen addressed elsewhere:

- Kane confirmed Matthew Prince (Cloudflare CEO) directly asked "can we build the next WordPress?" — this was top-down, not a skunkworks project

- Their Q2 roadmap was literally a question mark. They didn't know if anyone would care. The community response changed that, and they're actively allocating resources

- Plugin sandboxing outside Cloudflare is being worked on by community contributors; Kane expects a Node implementation "next week"

- They want federated/distributed plugin marketplaces (looking at the FAIR proposal), not a centralized store

- Joost de Valk (Yoast creator) already has a merged PR improving SEO handling in core

- No marketplace monetization yet, but they explicitly want devs to build commercial businesses on it

First 37 minutes is the interview, rest is discussion of implications from a WordPress product perspective.

Unfortunately (and unbelievably!), Massachusetts still burns trash.

> There are more than 100 municipal waste combustion facilities in operation across the United States. Five of these are located in Massachusetts.

https://www.mass.gov/guides/municipal-waste-combustors

Great write-up! I was sorry to see there wasn’t a reward for you reporting this to them.

At least you didn’t find that the bathroom rating tablets had audio as well!

Re:Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award on Wednesday March 05, 2025 @07:28AM (#43265655)
Very cool to see this! It turns out my wife and I bought Andy Barto’s (and his wife’s) house.

During the process, there was a bidding war. They said “make your prime offer” so, knowing he was a mathematician, we made an offer that was a prime number :-)

So neat to see him be recognized for his work.

Strange: the New York Times wrote about this on July 26, 2023.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/26/health/cancer-self-destru...

> The metal concentrations varied by where the tampons were purchased (US vs. EU/UK), organic vs. non-organic, and store- vs. name-brand. However, they found that metals were present in all types of tampons; no category had consistently lower concentrations of all or most metals. Lead concentrations were higher in non-organic tampons but arsenic was higher in organic tampons. > > Metals could make their way into tampons a number of ways: The cotton material could have absorbed the metals from water, air, soil, through a nearby contaminant (for example, if a cotton field was near a lead smelter), or some might be added intentionally during manufacturing as part of a pigment, whitener, antibacterial agent, or some other process in the factory producing the products.
Re:A Slower Speed of Light – MIT Game Lab on Monday May 13, 2024 @05:40PM (#40348832)
Playing this game on my 27” iMac was the first time I experienced nausea from motion sickness. I felt ill for two days.

Player beware!

Agreed. This article makes it sound like this is a perpetual motion machine.
Wow, this is intense!

Think twice before sampling it if you have any sensitivity to flashing lights. Might seem obvious, but apparently needs saying!

I had nocturnal childhood epilepsy and, thankfully, I grew out of it.

I would have an “aura” before going to bed that I would be having a seizure that night.

Thankfully, I never had a daytime seizure.

Re:NASA: Capillary Cup on Thursday October 12, 2023 @08:57AM (#37856542)
The article doesn’t address the question of how the cup truly works. It relies on capillary action but, based on the article, I’m not sure how.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capillary_action

Same in the west slope of Colorado. So much water is used to grow alfalfa, in part because there is a “use it or lose it” water rights policy:

> Failure to apply a water right to beneficial use when water was available for a period of ten or more years results in a rebuttable presumption of abandonment.

This leads to huge amounts of wasted water and alfalfa growing.

https://dwr.colorado.gov/services/water-administration/water...

Re:Skybox AI: Use AI to generate 3D worlds on Friday June 02, 2023 @01:02PM (#36167758)
Mine was stuck until I toggled the "Auto-pan skybox" setting and it appeared.
Re:Skybox AI: Use AI to generate 3D worlds on Friday June 02, 2023 @12:16PM (#36167066)
I gave it this prompt, which I didn't spend any time refining, and it came up with a world that does a pretty good job of matching it.

> A world made of very strong rock that has lots of rain. The rain contains acid, which wears the rock down. There is lots of soil, but it s in very thin layers because the world is relatively new.

https://skybox.blockadelabs.com/215b2684ceac6daac1958d020e24...

This article doesn’t really address statistics for younger people. I feel like the headline should be: should elderly people be given CPR? For me the answer is a strong no. Why on Earth would you give CPR to a 90-year old person!?

> survival after out-of-hospital CPR dropped from 6.7% for patients in their 70s to just 2.4% for those over 90

a) These features are truly moving. I didn’t expect to get emotional from a press release. b) It’s gonna be a bonkers keynote if they’re releasing this before WWDC.
Headline: Innovative company reinvents company town. Visionary leaders hope to drive employees into debt and eventually forced servitude.
You can just say “15 minutes” and it has a higher success rate for me.
The PNGs aren't optimized—I crunched them losslessly and saved 8%–10%.
Re:Our Shift to Usage-Based Pricing on Thursday March 30, 2023 @05:35PM (#35379115)
Hi Arpit! That’s wonderful news, thank you!

I’m running Appsmith Cloud.

Re:Our Shift to Usage-Based Pricing on Thursday March 30, 2023 @07:49AM (#35371190)
I would love to use Appsmith and pay-by-usage, but I’m blocked by not being able to SSH tunnel into MySQL.

Anyone with this same issue, please upvote!

https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith/issues/518

Re:Google Is Done on Thursday December 01, 2022 @02:04PM (#33821000)
They could still serve AdSense-style ads inside the generated content.
Re:Yahoo Pipes on Wednesday November 23, 2022 @08:24AM (#33718815)
Yahoo Pipes even supported running YQL as a node inside a pipe!

It was so good.

There’s a great short video on the Anglican Water website:

https://www.anglianwater.co.uk/community/rutland-sea-dragon

This is a great thread/analysis on Twitter by a maker of Newsletter Glue. She has extensive experience with all these providers:

https://twitter.com/lesley_pizza/status/1477841280990257152

Re:Japanese Typewriters on Monday July 26, 2021 @01:21PM (#27962176)
The title should be updated to reflect that it was written in 2009.

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