Javalicious

This. Van Halen has stated as much - if there are brown M&Ms, chances are really high they haven't paid attention to detail, and a deep dive is going to uncover some serious problems:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-did-van-hale...

As an aside, I did think the M&Ms story was just a band being a diva until I heard them explain it like this. It's actually brilliant.

Wow. This brings up some (bad) memories of working with an .epub export about 10 years ago. We had some embedded fonts to work around some poor rendering in some of the readers we tested, but some of the readers ignored the fonts altogether, causing the content to render boxes (bangs head on table)

It looks like not a whole lot has changed in that space -- the readers are still the gate for what you can do with the format. Who's available to make a CanIUse for epub readers, to shame them into compliance? (only partly /s)

There's the States Rights GOP, and then there's the Things Trump Doesn't Like. That executive order about paper straws (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14208) falls under the latter category.

A few years ago we did a road trip through that part of Texas, looking at the "painted churches" (https://thedaytripper.com/the-painted-churches-road-trip/ - there are other itineraries). This article sparked that memory, as one of the painted churches is actually a Wendish church.

And yes, there's a painted church in Shiner as well! :-)

When I first started in the industry, I worked in the documentation department of a small company. My boss had me write Windows Help files by hand before using tools like WinHelp / HTMLHelp. Years later I did much of the same thing when I dealt with generating .epub files from an editor.

There's something to be said for under-engineering, even if you're using higher-level frameworks. It gives you an idea of what the tools are doing under the hood, where they could possibly go wrong, and how errors can be fixed.

Yeah, I wish they would just keep the boilerplate OFL intact. I spent way too much time trying to figure out what the "real" license was, and if I could use it in my open source projects.

If this were Max Headroom snarkily reporting news, I might be more inclined to watch.

Yup. Which is why this question can give some good insight into how the company runs. Is it chaotic? Suffocatingly rigid? Or is there a pipeline to triage and introduce new features in a sustainable and beneficial way?

They had these out at the local Costco last night. Just a card scanner. Honestly, it wasn't that different from the "wave your card at the person in the front" system they had before -- it didn't slow things down much.

Hybrid app developer here (Apache Cordova). The work that I do is pretty close to web development + some hooks into native code (which is done by plugins) -- so your skills should transfer pretty readily.

The only headache that Donn eludes to that I've experienced had to do with Android's scoped storage. It's taken them a few tries to get it right, and their documentation hasn't really provided good best practices, so I've had to roll with the punches a few times. But I really haven't had to deal too much with Donn's other points.

Looks like they _might_ have been in the study set, but weren't separated out and focused on? At any rate, the author is hoping for the same:

"In the first edition of my book Why Gender Matters, published by Doubleday in 2005, I devoted a chapter to kids who are psychologically “gender-atypical.” I suggested that these kids are somewhere in between male and female. But the Stanford study provides little support for that claim. I am hopeful that the researchers will do follow-up studies specifically looking at individuals who are gender-nonconforming, gender-atypical, and who have gender dysphoria, to see whether and how those characteristics influence these findings."

As a middle-class Gen X-er, the FAFSA gives me PTSD already. ALL the hurdles, knowing that my kid won't get any financial aid anyway. I mean, what's the point? There should be an opt-out button at the beginning: "I know I'm not getting any help. Just finish the wizard and leave me alone."

"Best" is probably whatever you're familiar with. If your pre-pdf content is in Word, I'd just run with it -- most 'classic' word processors can handle the export to ebook stuff just fine. I've done exports from Apple Pages without issue.

That said -- if you're looking for a layout that reflows based on the screen size (read: more suited for mobile devices), you might want to look at exporting to .epub rather than .pdf.

Care to elaborate?

I look at the numbers in the article and my eyes glaze over; the only thing I got out of it was that they're urging India to bump its poverty level numbers. (I am decidedly _not_ and economist)

In this case, the push towards simplicity and sanity is just acknowledging the reality that front end dev is... not simple. From the blog post:

"Sometimes, people get angry at React or other FrontEnd frameworks just because they look scary or too complex. But the reality is, FrontEnd is complex."

Poops and car break-ins. Either data science people are really bored, or SF provides some interesting data points.

Ages ago (2010-2011 I think?), I worked on a tool that exported and packaged text into .epub format. At the time one of the biggest headaches was the lack of good font rendering in ePub readers. Apple's Books app did an okay job, but some of the others just ignored the font settings, _even when an embedded font was packaged in the file_. All the more frustrating when you consider that the text was not English, and the embedded fonts were necessary for properly rendering the code points and not displaying question marks or boxes.

No idea if the available readers have improved, but I'm all for this proposal of a self-contained reader.

I'm curious as to _how_ the data was collected for this report. Did they use camera feed data? Walk-button push counts? HR rideshare incentive data? Sending out surveys?

The article talked about trips -- but I didn't see any differentiation between commutes to work and walking in the park, for example.

There's a _slightly_ better one on the DOT site (https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/president-biden...), and that site links to a PDF with some more in depth info on the projects (https://railroads.dot.gov/elibrary/fy22-23-FSP-National-rail...).

The LA-Las Vegas route sounds interesting to me. That road tends to get really bad on the weekends, so I think it would serve a need for the bougie set that don't want to deal with traffic.

I resonated with Ezra Klein's "exodus shocks" concepts. With Musk at the helm of X, it just seems like there's the periodic random outrage that pushes people to at least try other alternatives (and maybe stop logging into X itself). Some of it sticks. I ended up with a Mastodon account and it just seems much more chill. YMMV I guess.

Also - https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=blueskyweb.org

Is there a way to get Mastodon linked news?

I wish more companies would do that. Just grind down the backlog and stabilize the code base. "Move fast and ... then go back and fix things."

Exactly this. I've got anecdata from people who have left because they can't afford housing, to retirement age people who are cashing in on their real estate and moving somewhere cheap, to conservatives moving to a more conservative state.

The only _kind of_ real data point in this article is that the last item (politics) makes for 1/3 of the people leaving.

Thanks for this (paywall and archive were acting up). The people I know who use Life360 definitely skew towards the Sky Is Falling mindset, so that puts the survey in context. Life360's income depends on that mindset.

Honestly, I think so much of the attitudes towards tracking apps has to do with how they're used/abused. I don't have a stalker nor crazy authoritarian parents, but I do have a nosy family member that I don't share my Find My location with. I will look up my kids' location if they're traveling, to make sure they've arrived safely. That's pretty much it.

This reads like a Zen Koan. :-)

Lawns provide oxygen, filter rainwater, prevent soil erosion, and are better at absorbing / releasing heat energy than hard surfaces. But they take a lot of water to maintain -- in water-restricted areas, you're probably better off with more drought-tolerant vegetation that will have the same benefits.

The gas-powered lawn mower will always be bad for the environment.

Yup, and Kickstarter as well.

I realize I'm a bit of a fossil, but I do feel better about giving revenue to the artist as much as possible (Bandcamp, Kickstarter, Amazon downloads). I don't get exposed to the same breadth of music, but the band actually sees some money. I suppose the ideal situation would be to use a Spotify-type service for finding new bands, and then using a more direct route to pay for those I like.

I was going to respond to this, only to have found myself at the end of an urban legend (no, there isn't a stipulation in the US to have 1 in every 5 miles straight in the US interstate highway system in order to allow for emergency landing of aircraft: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/landing-of-hope-and-glory/).

I do agree with the other sibling responses, though -- bombs cost money, and there's a lot of roadway that would need to be bombed in order to render entire highway systems unusable. So that's probably where the "win" comes in -- being nimble in takeoff / landing of aircraft locations makes life much more difficult for the enemy.

Kinda? It's not like there aren't alternatives, but the user base numbers are vastly different. I'd be curious to know how many of these are active users now.

BlueSky: 1 million (Sept 2023) https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bluesky-officially-hits-1-mil...

Mastadon: 10 million (March 2023) https://www.statista.com/statistics/1376022/global-registere...

Threads: 100 million (July 2023) https://www.reuters.com/technology/metas-twitter-rival-threa...

I'd argue that VB6 got close. But yeah, programming isn't particularly a "the people" sort of activity.

A little pedantic, but it's worth mentioning that the assumption here is _spoken_ languages. There's a whole set of sign languages around the world as well.