I just hate Uber Pool and Lyft Line - the routes they take are often side streets with lots of congestion and turns, there's a lot of frustration when you're almost to your destination or to a major road and then the driver turns around to pick up another passenger. Drivers often play music I find annoying.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16385053

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

It's very strange to describe Amazon (at least engineering roles) as a sweatshop considering how well compensated employees are.

*Not counting something like phone gap.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15390156

Points: 5

# Comments: 3

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15351241

Points: 14

# Comments: 3

http://www.politifact.com/global-news/statements/2016/jun/15...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15054038

Points: 135

# Comments: 44

I agree that there have been institutional changes after the NYT article that have made the company more employee friendly.

Some standards are enforced by law - fire codes for instance, or food handling standards. Do accessibility standards merit similar treatment? I'd argue that most people now need to use the Internet for basic functions in their lives. For instance, you can't even get a job at a chain grocery store around here without filling out an online application. Given that, there's a strong social interest in making sure that everyone has access. That interest has to be balanced against other interests - costs to businesses for instance. I'm not necessarily suggesting that we should treat WCAG the same way we would treat a fire code (which a government agency enforces) or as we treat ADA building compliance (where customers can sue to force compliance), but I do think that a debate on this issue should look at what these standards actually do, and try to balance the interests. I don't think the parent is doing that.

They're not arbitrary design policies at all. They're standards that exist for a reason. For instance, if you have some text, display it as text, not as an image of text, because a screen reader won't be able to read it.

> The inevitable effect of this kind of legislation is that technology gets worse for everyone, rather than better for a small group.

Actually, complying with accessibility standards makes the web better for everyone. Here's an example. The giant green table on this website used to just be an image[1]. That made the page useless for screen readers, but it also meant that you couldn't copy the data in the table, couldn't resize the text, etc. A common sense change to display this table as text made the page more useful for everyone.

https://www.boston.gov/cityscore

[Edit] To take another example, 10% of men are colorblind. If you're using color to convey information, you may be making your website very difficult to use for 5% of your customers. If you're operating at any kind of scale, the gains in making your website easier to use for 5% of your customers are going to outweigh the costs of making a change by a wide margin.