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<input> I ♡ you, but you’re bringing me down – Monica Dinculescu

If you have web developer friends, show them this article and watch as their face starts to twitch. TL;DR: good piece about browser inconsistencies around HTML forms (of which there are many)

1995 was a good year. Friends, ER, Xena were all on TV. TLC had dominated the charts with “Waterfalls”. Browsers were ok, because HTML was pretty ok. We had Mosaic, Netscape and IE1, and the HTML2 spec was finally getting around to standardizing forms. 1995 was the year when <input> was born, and now that it’s about old enough to drink, we need to have a talk.

Oh man, just found this other awesome quote:

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, JavaScript

You see, I can justify CSS quirks. I worked on Chrome for 2 years, I work next to the Blink team now, I understand we’re all writing different renderers and they all have their own CSS bugs. However, the <input> API isn’t quirky — it’s literally just a jar of spiders, and the moment you open the jar, it’s too late. You’re covered in spiders. Even your cat is a spider now. Better find some fire.

Source: I ♡ you, but you’re bringing me down – Monica Dinculescu

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Page Weight Matters – Chris Zacharias

TL;DR: “Many of us are fortunate to live in high bandwidth regions, but there are still large portions of the world that do not. By keeping your client side code small and lightweight, you can literally open your product up to new markets.”

I was just about to give up on the project, with my world view completely shattered, when my colleague discovered the answer: geography.
When we plotted the data geographically and compared it to our total numbers broken out by region, there was a disproportionate increase in traffic from places like Southeast Asia, South America, Africa, and even remote regions of Siberia. Further investigation revealed that, in these places, the average page load time under Feather was over TWO MINUTES! This meant that a regular video page, at over a megabyte, was taking more than TWENTY MINUTES to load!

Source: Page Weight Matters

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Auto-Generating Clickbait With Recurrent Neural Networks | Lars Eidnes’ blog

TL;DR: the author set up neural networks to auto-generate clickbait headlines. View the output at http://clickotron.com/ or click through to read about the system.

In total, this gives us an infinite source of useless journalism, available at no cost. If I remember correctly from economics class, this should drive the market value of useless journalism down to zero, forcing other producers of useless journalism to produce something else.

Source: Auto-Generating Clickbait With Recurrent Neural Networks | Lars Eidnes’ blog

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America’s Child-Marriage Problem – The New York Times

Wow… I had no idea this was still happening here in the US! I support the author’s suggestion to eliminate these “exceptions” that enable underage marriage.

Of course, one person’s “parental consent” can be another’s “parental coercion,” but state laws typically do not call for anyone to investigate whether a child is marrying willingly. Even in the case of a girl’s sobbing openly while her parents sign the application and force her into marriage, the clerk usually has no authority to intervene. In fact, in most states there are no laws that specifically forbid forced marriage.

Source: America’s Child-Marriage Problem – The New York Times

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TJ Miller of HBOs Silicon Valley Tries to Guess What 10 Actual Startups Do

There are a lot of funnily-named startups here… Having a comedic actor guess what they are = lulz. Here’s my favorite:

WhalePath
T.J.’s guess: “That’s a site that tells you the general migration patterns of whales. And it’s not a very funny site. It’s incredibly informative. It’s for the maritime man in all of us.”
Actually: A crowdsourced business growth site

Source: TJ Miller of HBOs Silicon Valley Tries to Guess What 10 Actual Startups Do

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Urban activists set out to sue San Francisco’s suburbs | Grist

“It’s not just a lawsuit,” says Trauss. “It’s a political exercise. Most people would be very uncomfortable tearing down 315 houses. But they don’t have a similar objection to never building them in the first place, even though I feel they’re morally equivalent. Those people show up anyway. They get born anyway. They get a job in the area anyway. What do they do? They live in an overcrowded situation, they pay too much rent, they have a commute that’s too long. Or maybe they outbid someone else, and someone else is displaced.”

“It’s easy to see the problem when you’re tearing down someone’s home. But when you’re not building, it’s hard to see whose home it is.”

Source: Urban activists set out to sue San Francisco’s suburbs | Grist

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The white man in that photo | GRIOT

I never knew the backstory of this man—Peter Norman—until now… very interesting! TL;DR: he consciously chose to stand with these men, and was ostracized from the Australian Olympic community as a result.

The two Americans had asked Norman if he believed in human rights. Norman said he did. They asked him if he believed in God, and he, who had been in the Salvation Army, said he believed strongly in God. “We knew that what we were going to do was far greater than any athletic feat, and he said “I’ll stand with you” – remembers John Carlos – “I expected to see fear in Norman’s eyes, but instead we saw love.”

Source: The white man in that photo | GRIOT

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The remarkable thing that happens to poor kids when you give their parents a little money – The Washington Post

A fascinating and fortunate longitudinal study is able to draw conclusions from these families receiving what amounts to basic income. TL;DR: Everyone benefitted.

There’s also the question of stress, which the extra money helps relieve—even if only a little. While the added income wasn’t enough to allow parents to quit their jobs, it’s a base level that helped with rent and food and other basic expenses. That, Akee said, is powerful enough itself.
“We know that the thing poor couples fight about the most is money,” he said. “Off the bat, this means a more harmonious family environment.”

Source: The remarkable thing that happens to poor kids when you give their parents a little money – The Washington Post

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Solwa’s Solar-Powered Machines Help Farmers Dry Their Food Instead Of Letting It Rot

The company behind this tech (@solwasrl) is interesting too—they have a product for desalination (solar) and one that makes fuel from seawater sludge!

A lot of food grown in developing countries never makes it to the people’s bellies. Because of a lack of refrigeration, it rots during transport or when farmers fail to sell it immediately at markets. Every year, 1.3 billion tons of food (with a value of more than $1 trillion) is wasted in this way, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization.
Drying food is a good alternative to cooling (perhaps you’ve heard of beef jerky). And with the FoodWa system, developed by a startup in Italy, you don’t even need electricity to do that. Its dryer runs completely on solar energy, which is captured both in the form of heat and by solar panels.

Source: These Solar-Powered Machines Help Farmers Dry Their Food Instead Of Letting It Rot | Co.Exist | ideas + impact

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Meet The Mystery Vigilantes Who Created ‘Malware’ To Secure 10,000 Routers – Forbes

TL;DR: apparently altruistic hackers made a botnet that removes other malware from easily-compromised routers.

Interestingly, this isn’t the first time a computer virus has removed others from the system!

They also placed their malware (or goodware depending on which way you look at it) under the General Public License, the widely-used free software license written by Stallman.There’s still a concern that despite the hackers’ promises, they could still use Wifatch for evil – something The White Team even warned about. When asked if they could be trusted, the hackers wrote: “Of course not, you should secure your device.”

Source: Meet The Mystery Vigilantes Who Created ‘Malware’ To Secure 10,000 Routers – Forbes