jfk13

According to a quick Google search,

> On average, about 35 g of salt is present in each 1 kg of seawater

so if those 700 billion kg of water for LA all came from desalination, that would yield 24.5 billion kg of salt.

That suggests we could have 12 LA-sized cities relying entirely on desalination before we'd saturate the world's demand for salt.

I guess it's no more insensitive than writing a book titled "The ___ Bible" (for your choice of language or topic... there are plenty of examples).

I suspect that if you distributed emergency supplies ahead of time, some people would treat it as a convenient handout and simply consume them.

And even aside from the temptation to use the supplies, not everyone would be able to find a place to store a month of rations & water.

This sounds uncomfortably like a call for more of the consolidation and industrialisation of farming, in the name of efficiency, that has been devastating to our environment.

Yes, indeed. If I read a history book about Charles Darwin, I'm generally aware that I am reading a particular author's portrayal of the man, his life and his times -- and that there are other books about him that may give a different slant or interpretation.

But in 10 years, when intrasight "sits down in VR for a deep conversation with Charles Darwin", there's liable to be an unspoken assumption that the interaction is somehow based on a "reality" that in fact is unknowable.

> with any historical figure

Don't you mean "with a fictional representation of a historical figure"?

> Website Publishing: Create a Web Project to add any font from our service to your website

It doesn't say "...add any font from our service to websites for your clients", though.

> everybody else used CRLF pair to indicate a linebreak

Almost everybody... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline#Representation mentions a couple that apparently used LFCR.

I believe Firefox blocks them by default. See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/third-party-cookies-fir...

Sad that they didn't make the soft landing. Let's hope India's attempt succeeds!

Still, I love the phrasing of the Roscosmos quote:

> "The apparatus moved into an unpredictable orbit and ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the surface of the Moon"

On the other hand, assuming it's OK to ignore the special edge cases (or not even thinking of them) can come back to bite you (or your users) when eventually one of them does show up in a situation you didn't anticipate.

Found a job locally? Where are you going to live? From wikipedia:

> Almost all housing is owned by the various employers and institutions and rented to their employees; there are only a few privately owned houses, most of which are recreational cabins. Because of this, it is difficult to live on Svalbard without working for an established institution.

Indeed, some pushers were used early in WW1; e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Aircraft_Factory_F.E.2

But as you say, the puller turned out to be superior.

HTML+CSS, converted to PDF via the Save As PDF feature in Firefox. (Or the same could be done with other browsers, but this one apparently comes from FF.)

Irrelevant. Collecting telemetry such as Mozilla does isn't remotely like having remote root access to people's phones.

It's not remotely feasible to test more than a tiny fraction of the variety of devices, configurations, and sites that a product like Firefox is going to encounter in the real world.

You know perfectly well that's not what they meant.

> Firefox is unusable on Linux. Way too slow.

That may be true for you, but not in general. Perhaps there's something about your system configuration that it doesn't handle well.

Only seems to work in Chrome (not Safari or Firefox).

Maybe it's just a personal thing; maybe it's partly about the translation you pick. But I remember reading Crime & Punishment back in my 20s (without any expectations or background knowledge), and I found it absolutely gripping.

[eta:] On the other hand, some years later I got totally bogged down in Brothers Karamazov, and (rarely, for me) didn't finish the book.

A minor correction:

> Let's say we want to display the emoji for a brown man, “<brown man>”. There isn't a code point for that. Instead we use “<man> ZWJ <brown>”.

(with the emoji replaced, as I expect HN would strip them).

That's inaccurate: skin tone modifiers are used directly after a base emoji character, without a zero-width joiner in between.

The company is now known as "...er" :)

Ah, good times.... we used to do similar things across the HP Apollo workstations at the place where a friend of mine worked (and I unofficially "borrowed" computing facilities for a project of my own -- though I did also contribute a substantial speed optimization to their main product, so nobody seemed to mind).

Yes, I suppose it could be taken that way. I wasn't intending to argue one way or the other, merely to point out that such an apparently simple condition ("if someone understands...") actually encompasses a huge amount of uncertainty, and so doesn't necessarily represent the "easy answer" that it might at first appear.

And how do we assess whether "someone understands the risk"? Often, I suspect nobody really "understands" the risk of some minimally-tested, experimental treatment.

Well, those are pretty controversial topics, so I'm not sure how much the analogy helps.

Do you have trouble with "n" vs "u"? How about "b", "d", "p", "q"?

Surprised no-one has mentioned Betteridge's Law of Headlines yet.

> Harfbuzz is used in Firefox, Chrome and Safari for example

Not to dispute harfbuzz's significance -- it's a crucial component of much of the software we use every day -- but are you sure about Safari? I thought it relied on Apple's Core Text framework to handle font shaping.