Hacker News: famfamfam

New comment by famfamfam in "We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees"

famfamfam — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:51:36 +0000

During a 1 month period (2024-03-26 to 2024-04-25) FontAwesome sent me 18 different marketing emails, including 4 in one day. I am not sure that matches with their supposed 'instinct' and I am unsurprised that they have a bad email reputation.

New comment by famfamfam in "A Blog Post with Every HTML Element"

famfamfam — Sun, 13 Aug 2023 12:45:51 +0000

Regarding the

element, which the OP mentions their confusion about as:

> I was initially surprised that it survived to HTML 5 (while didn’t) because modern browsers treat it as essentially a

HTML 5.2 was retired by W3C in 2021 in favour of the WhatWG HTML Living Standard, which (unlike HTML 5.2) never deprecated

, and has been redefined as representing "a toolbar consisting of its contents, in the form of an unordered list of items (represented by li elements), each of which represents a command that the user can perform or activate.".

Wikipedia's list of elements seems to be out of date here — along with a lot of the Wikipedia information on HTML versions — as the

element is still alive. Given its history of being repeatedly deprecated, and the fact that event recently browsers were confused by exactly what semantics to assign to , you are probably nearly always better off using

New comment by famfamfam in "Show HN: hue.tools – open-source toolbox for colors"

famfamfam — Thu, 17 Feb 2022 02:29:02 +0000

Really cool site! After playing with it for a while, could the CSS gradient for MIX could be changed to use the same number of color stops as there are steps rather than just using the start and end, to better match the chosen interpolation mode? I had a great gradient in LAB space, but the CSS version interpolates through ugly greys in RGB.

New comment by famfamfam in "Lorem Picsum, death by a million pixel-gigabits"

famfamfam — Mon, 12 Aug 2019 16:32:41 +0000

For reference: I do about 7GB of image traffic/day for placekitten (a similar service) for about the same cost ($6/mo). I do resize images.

New comment by famfamfam in "Show HN: I connected my house lights to video games"

famfamfam — Wed, 20 Jul 2016 22:06:02 +0000

> Ideally, the games themselves would have some sort of API, or some other way to either communicate what’s happening in the game so I can map colors to it

A number of games implement Mumble Link (https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Link) which provides a memory-mapped file that includes positional data used to provide directional sound by voice-comms software (so when a teammate speaks you hear their voice as if you were both in your relevant locations in the shared virtual space). Some games also expose other data through this including health/mana/ammo levels which could be used to control lighting based on game state.

New comment by famfamfam in "Robin"

famfamfam — Sun, 03 Apr 2016 03:15:59 +0000

I was also in this room, merged in from powerlanguage's side into Notch's group. The group ended up convincing about 40-50 members to vote to Stay, and when the vote passed it created a private subreddit for the group with random members as admins (including Notch). This was before auto-vote scripts and bots became common.

The subreddit is currently coming up with a theme for itself (based on part of the name that was automatically generated for us), and has seen users sharing spare copies of games and introducing themselves.

Unfortunately /u/powerlanguage chose to grow on without us.

New comment by famfamfam in "Show HN: Hint.css v2.0 – Pure CSS tooltip library"

famfamfam — Tue, 02 Feb 2016 00:15:12 +0000

I am seeing blurry text on every tooltip as it animates in, not just the one on the download button. I assume it is related to ClearType rendering the text on non-pixel locations.

Chrome 47, Windows 8, ClearType enabled.

Cognitive Lode – Brain gems for decision-makers

famfamfam — Tue, 25 Mar 2014 11:02:36 +0000

Article URL: http://coglode.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7465034

Points: 97

# Comments: 26

New comment by famfamfam in "I build High Availability Platforms so Cloud is not for me"

famfamfam — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 15:37:23 +0000

Not to mention the fact that in addition to you being good (and therefore expensive) to have a HA system, you would need at least two of you.

New comment by famfamfam in "Will the Americans with Disabilities Act tear a hole in Internet law?"

famfamfam — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 14:50:24 +0000

To see where this might lead, consider the UK, where this is already the case. The Equality Act 2012 [1] (which itself is a replacement for the Disabilities Discrimination Act which also applied to websites) requires:

  A person (a “service-provider”) concerned with the provision of a service to the public or a section of the public (for payment or not) must not discriminate against a person requiring the service by not providing the person with the service.

It applies to websites (Airline BMI Baby was sued by the National Institute for the Blind for failure to meet the as-then Disabilities Discrimination Act).

The typical paraphrasing I hear from developers is that it requires an organisation (but not necessarily the developer) to make "every reasonable effort to comply", for which there is a baseline of appropriate colour contrast and reviewing WCAG validation.

It does mean that developers for UK-based services are less disposed to Javascript-heavy applications/components and video content (because of the requirement for ARIA and transcripts/CC respectively).

[1] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/part/3/crosshead...

New comment by famfamfam in "Webdesigners: please make text readable"

famfamfam — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 12:30:35 +0000

Mark Hurrell has blogged some of his testing on Helvetica font stacks (including Neue) at http://blog.mhurrell.co.uk/post/2946358183/updating-the-helv... which is worth a read. Current recommendation is to specify sans-serif but with additional specifications for Linux:

  font-family: Helmet, Freesans, sans-serif;

New comment by famfamfam in "War on Urchin"

famfamfam — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 11:30:14 +0000

I have always been uneasy about the fact that Urchin/Google Analytics 'campaign tags', when copied and distributed via other services, do not continue to represent the original campaign. For example, for the following campaign URL includes three additional pieces of information:

http://example.com/?utm_source=June%2B2011%2BNewsletter&...

Source: June 2011 Newsletter

Medium: Email

Campaign Name: Free Summer Tickets

The moment that you store that URL in other service, a number of those tags become incorrect anyway (it is not an email anymore), and the stats you will get from it will be tainted. Campaign tags are useful, but this approach by pinboard may end up in tracking being more accurate (certainly from in terms of tracking campaign media/terms/content), at the cost of removing the campaign name.

There is also little difference between this and a URL such as http://example.com/Free-Summer-Tickets/June-2011-Newsletter?... being set up to serve the original content other than at least with the campaign tags you've got a single canonical URL using the more correct query parameter mechanism.

New comment by famfamfam in "Introducing schema.org: Search engines come together for a richer web"

famfamfam — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 20:38:03 +0000

Information in specific types — including reviews — exposed using microformats, RDFa or microdata has already been used by Google for over 2 years, they call it "Rich Snippets", and it does improve the quality of experience for users, assuming that you equate an increase in clickthroughs to mean that the user percieves that page to be more useful compared to other SERPs results (and anecdotally I always go for results which include rich snippet information gleaned from pages with the required semantic enhancements).

This announcement is not the proposal of a new technique, but rather the extension of one which is already working and is a good thing for the web.

New comment by famfamfam in "Introducing schema.org: Search engines come together for a richer web"

famfamfam — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 20:29:27 +0000

The HTML data-* attributes are intended for private data only; i.e., to store data to be used as configuration for a Javascript plugin but which does not hold semantic value and cannot be represented as actual content, whereas microdata (which is what theyre using and is also part of the HTML5 specification) is meant only for describing how the content of the page maps to some schema.

UK Information Commissioner’s Office changes law to require opt-in for cookies

famfamfam — Mon, 09 May 2011 16:51:13 +0000

Article URL: http://www.ico.gov.uk/~/media/documents/pressreleases/2011/cookies_regulations_advice_news_release_20110509.ashx

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2529339

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by famfamfam in "Amazon Cloud Drive Is Not Dropbox"

famfamfam — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 20:12:29 +0000

Now that Amazon S3 provides Website Endpoints and index documents [1][2], it is probably fairly trivial to set this up either using an S3 sync tool, or an S3 mount such as ExpanDrive, without resorting to CloudDrive or EC2.

You would need to set-up CNAMES for your subdomains though, and it will not work with the primary (non-www.) domain.

[1] http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/Websit...

[2] http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/02/host-your-static-website-...

New comment by famfamfam in "Pictures of kittens for use as placeholders in your designs or code"

famfamfam — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 20:48:27 +0000

There are a couple of other services which are more "client-suitable" and have a few more options:

* http://dummyimage.com/ * http://placehold.it/

The most useful thing to come out of this post for me is the knowledge of dummyimages.com, and specifically the aliases for the IAB standard ad sizes such as http://dummyimage.com/leaderboard/E/C. Great work by Russell Heimlich on that site, and the source code is MIT too if you want to run it locally.

New comment by famfamfam in "Pictures of kittens for use as placeholders in your designs or code"

famfamfam — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 19:41:35 +0000

Traffic was unexpected, I was expecting the site to travel within a small group of friends and colleagues who were in on the joke. I uploaded the site to a mediatemple (dv) server, on which Apache's MaxClients is set to a paltry 20. Whilst the server appears to be fine, Apache is unable to satisfy the requests, and I am unwilling to up the MaxClients because normally (mt) automatically disable the server.

It appears that most of the requests were being made to the ~8 images on the homepage, so I've moved these to an S3 bucket and the site is now responsive again. Hardly HIGH TECHNOLOGY, but any port works in a storm (and AWS is typically my 'any port').

I've also repointed nameservers to run via a https://www.cloudflare.com/ free account which should provide a reverse caching proxy for the homepage at the least, but will take some time to kick in.

The lesson to learn — one that I would expect most would not need to learn — is that launching a website (even in jest) in a 5 minute break in-between real work with real deadlines is not advisable.

And to second the parent post, I don't feel comfortable with this being posted to HN at all, and certainly not with it ranking #1/#2. I fear someone may have timed it perfectly to start Eternal February.

New comment by famfamfam in "Pictures of kittens for use as placeholders in your designs or code"

famfamfam — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 17:52:15 +0000

It also appears that I should have taken that extra couple of hours to host the site somewhere other than a small mediatemple server, you're all hitting HTTP client limits at the moment.

New comment by famfamfam in "Pictures of kittens for use as placeholders in your designs or code"

famfamfam — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 17:43:06 +0000

Mark here, I threw placekitten.com together this weekend after a journey on a train in which I could not access placehold.it and few weeks of jokes about the concept with colleagues.

I was not planning on posting to HN, as I thought that a kitten-meme related site might not be the most appropriate (looks like the wisdom of the crowd has decided otherwise).

I can't claim that the server will stand up, so I would refrain from using the site for anything critical (not sure why you would need/want to), or that caching is entirely correct (I'm sending far-future expires, but I'm sure that I could improve given some time).

Glad that the internet likes kittens though. Confirmed a suspicion I had.