Hacker News Reader

nedon Launch HN: Parsagon (YC W21) – AI for public affairs and government relations

I see that you are quoting in extenso News articles (I read one from the DailyMail). How did you secure the copyright issues of reproducing full articles ?

nedon Mixtral of experts

We'll see what comes out of ALTEDIC - https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/lds/items/797961/en

nedon Substance: a JavaScript library for web-based content editing

Very exciting project, specially the support for custom document schemas.

If the authors are around, I'd love to hear what was their thinking regarding implementing focus and selection, with regards to the inconvenients outlined by the author of ProseMirror here: http://marijnhaverbeke.nl/blog/prosemirror.html#general-appr...

In a nutshell, ProseMirror chose to keep contentEditable in order to have browser-level support for spell-checking, screen-readers, RTL, etc.

What are the tradeoffs exactly?

Thanks.

nedon Europe Remotely – EU-friendly remote dev jobs

When you are full-time employed, remotely, by a european company, and living in another european country, does anyone know :

— do you set yourself up as a freelance consultant, and pay your healthcare and retirement fund yourself?

— …or do you let the company pay that for you in the country they are based in, and somehow benefit from that?

How does it work exactly for these social benefits that are very important in the european welfare model?

nedon What is it like to have never felt an emotion?

  For instance, one day at school he was working with the student theatre.
  All week he had been struggling to produce the right sound effects, 
  but it just wasn’t coming together. Eventually, his boss lost his cool
  and started ripping into him. “My response was that something weird was
  happening with my body,” he says. “I could feel a tension, like my heart
  was racing, but my mind was distracted…

Isn't this an extreme case of repressing emotions, in the most classic sense? The disconnect between bodily reaction and lack of mindfullness seems to indicate it.

nedon IPFS: The Permanent Web

Yes!

Ted Nelson talks about this in this amazing and inspiring Google Talk video from 2006. He talks about the rise of packet-based networking, and how the future will be content-centric.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCZMoY3q2uM

nedon Doctored.js – A new kind of editor

Super interesting.

How does this compare to Xopus? https://xopus.com/

Of course, Xopus is closed source, so that's a big difference already.

nedon Drp.io: Fast and easy images hosting

Similar to http://chromatic.io Nicely done.

nedon More on the NSA Commandeering the Internet

I'm not worried about being under surveillance. I'm neither interesting, nor engaged in anything interesting.

That's probably the feeling of most people. Martin Fowler wrote an insightful post about this subject:

Privacy Protects Bothersome People …and isn't about me (or probably you) http://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.html

He argues that privacy on the internet is important, not because normal people have something to hide, but because journalists and activists (or other counterpowers in a well-balanced democracy) need a certain level of privacy in order to work.

nedon Choosing a payment provider for your Europe-based SaaS startup

In the long run yes, when they have revenue. But they mention:

But then, one day when I came back to their website, I saw that they had added a minimum fee of €100 to their plan, and that unfortunately tipped the scale for us, as we pay everything on our own, and we have zero revenue coming in.

So the problem is for the first few months during which you pay everything out of your own pocket. It probably all depends on how confident you are that you'll get revenue.

How simple/hard is it to migrate from system to another?

nedon What No One Told You About Z-Index

The really crazy thing is that we had great proposals for much better layout systems, and they were rejected:

- First, the model with "springs and struts", employed by all major native GUIs for decades, and also implemented in Firefox as the first Flexbox model (for XUL, the UI description markup language) since ages.

- Second, the constraints-based layout model, now employed by OSX 10.8 and considered even superior, was proposed in 1999! http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/constraints/web/ccss-u...

The only explanation I can come up with is a giant disconnect between users (web developers) and implementors.

nedon How I made Stripe as easy to use as Paypal in 5 days

* Documentation provided as a monolithic 600 page PDF.

nedon CSS Flexbox Please

Flexbox is the most underrated CSS modules out there. Making flexible layouts based on the size of the viewport without it is either a major pain or flat out impossible without resorting to JS.

I don't understand why all the CSS efforts are being put into elaborate effects (transforms, blend modes, compositing, etc) when we can't yet effectively create UI layouts. Other underrated property is the non-standard "-webkit-line-clamp" (or "-o-ellipsis-lastline" for Opera), that allows you to cut off with an ellipsis a block of text after a given number of lines.

It's such a shame that the idea of constraints-based layout (the UI layout method of OSX 10.8) in CSS was never adopted: http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/constraints/web/ccss-u...

nedon Xiki: A shell console with GUI features.

Excellent, really cool. On OSX, this is what AppleScript and Automator should have been.

Would it be possible to tap into GUI applications via OSX UI Scripting, and maybe mirroring the app's menus with Wiki menus?

nedon Select2 - A better way to make select boxes (with jQuery)

It also breaks two OSX defaults:

  - spacebar on a highlighted item should select it

  - the select menu should open on mousedown, not mouseup.

Otherwise, it's a very nice piece of work.

nedon Retina.js: Retina graphics for your website

The idea of compound images is really interesting, although it would require an extra HTTP request to fetch the hight-DPI portion of the image. But maybe less of a problem over SPDY?

The idea truncatable bitstreams is fascinating too. I'm not well versed in networking, but wouldn't the latency of a mobile network kill the benefit of this technique? e.g, by the time the server receives the "connection closed" signal, a large part of the extra data would have been sent, no?

nedon Retina.js: Retina graphics for your website

No, the distinction of device pixels vs. CSS pixels predates the first "Retina" iPhone. The distinction existed in all browsers supporting full page zoom, including the Safari on the first iPhone, and in Opera for years before that.

"Retina" is just a marketing term for "pixels so small your eye can't distinguish them at a normal distance anymore".

nedon CSS px is an Angular Measurement

I'm afraid this boat has long sailed. The "pixel" term is in the CSS 2.1 Spec. It's set in stone.

Personally I've made peace with it. I say either "CSS pixels" or "device pixels", depending on what I want to express.

And although the high resolution screens have only made the difference between the two more visible, it was there since Opera featured full pages zoom many years ago, and when Mobile Safari introduced the "viewport" meta-tag in 2007.

nedon JQAPI - Alternative jQuery Documentation

Very nice. Better discoverability than http://dochub.io/ that is search only.

nedon Pictos Icon Font Server

Interesting service, and very well executed.

The one problem that I have with pictograms-as-fonts is anti-aliasing. The designers that I work with spend hours to make their icons absolutely perfect at every pixel size that they'll be displayed at. This is particularly visible when the icon has horizontal or vertical lines. Most of the time you'll want them have a hard edge, and with anti-aliasing you can never be sure you'll get that result.

This will change in a few years when all our screens have high pixel densities, but for the time being I'm sticking with PNG sprites, with hand-tweeked pixels.

nedon How France’s Free will reinvent mobile

It's also disruption by simplicity:

– the Terms and Conditions sheet will only be "one page long" and "understandable by anyone", compared to the multiple pages of legalese of the current operators;

– they only have 2 offers (with a variant for current clients), compared to hundreds from the competition.

We all know the value of simplicity when making purchasing decisions (explained in The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz).

Well done Free.

nedon The New Web Typography

So it seems like we now have two way of specifying small caps:

  font-feature-settings: "smcp=1”;

and…

  font-variant: small-caps;

The later is the CSS 2.1 syntax, and will force the browser to create small caps on its own if the chosen font doesn't contain small caps glyphs.

The Open Type version is probably better, since it falls back to lower case glyphs if the browser doesn't support them, instead of an emulated version that probably won't be very legible.

nedon The Billy Baldwin of Conditional Assignment in Ruby

Interesting.

For the example cited, you could also use ActiveRecord::Dirty

  def clean_summary
    self.summary = summary.squish if self.summary_changed?
  end

nedon Ask HN: Archive of well-designed PSDs?

http://365psd.com/

nedon I Hate CSS

After doing front-end development for 10 years, I have come to the conclusion that 97.3% of all my annoyances with CSS would disappear if IE and Opera adopted the Flexible Box Model (http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-flexbox/): vertical centering, scaling based on available space, constraints-based scaling, etc.

This is basic layout behaviours that I keep spending hours implementing in JS, which is slow and brittle, because you need fallbacks, etc.

nedon The Day US Customs Found A Bullet In My Pocket

> Is there an english word for the practice of commonly refering to an entity by a subset of that entity?

A metonymy.

[edit: swolchok is right, it's a synecdoche]

nedon Tiny Core offers a complete Linux solution in 11MB

Joyent came out with such a product in 2007, called Slingshot. I remember it being quite slow (…for what was supposed to be a desktop app), but functional.

http://joyeur.com/2007/03/22/joyent-slingshot/

nedon New cheap cloud from Kimsufi (Ovh)

I've had dedicated servers, shared hosts and individual domains with them for a few years. I had a hardware failure on a server once, the HD died, they replaced it in a few hours, it was handled pretty efficiently. The price is really low. The connectivity in Europe is good (although my customers are mostly based in France, so I don't have real benchmarks from elsewhere).

Two caveats:

- They have no taste and are really bad a interface design. Their administration tools are notoriously confusing, even after years of using them I'm still blown away at how they manage to make something simple so complicated. The boss (Octave) will post product announcements in the forums, and not in the official newsletter, encouraging a cult following of enthusiats/amateurs (that can be seen as both good or bad I guess…). Don't expect good documentation either.

- support is sub-par. I only contacted them a couple of times, and my carefully worded questions were met by a standardized reply, as if they had only read half of my email.

tl;dr : if you're a good sysadmin and don't need any hand-holding, they are good.