HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

trnglina

143 karma · joined February 20, 2017

submissionscomments
trnglina··on Canadians are leaving the country at record levels. Can anyone solve this?
Tokyo! It's a city with its pluses and minuses, but having already spoken Japanese before coming, I enjoy the everyday life more than any other place I've been.

A big difference I would say between a place like Tokyo and most urbanist cities in NA is that public transit is overwhelmingly the default here. My experience is that even in Vancouver or Montreal, it wouldn't be strange to have an acquaintance or relative who lives in one of the extended suburbs or a neighboring city, and for whom driving is default.

trnglina··on Canadians are leaving the country at record levels. Can anyone solve this?
Fair. I disagree with your conclusion, but I don't think it's an unfounded position to take.

Nevertheless, I imagine this is an unusually salient issue for us. I imagine for the average Canadian emigrant, the fact that the US offers a greater quantity of better quality, higher paying, jobs, is a much bigger contributor than urban planning.

trnglina··on Canadians are leaving the country at record levels. Can anyone solve this?
As an educated young professional who emigrated from Canada, car dependency and low density cities were major reasons I left. Suburban sprawl is a prison without a car, and I have no intentions of driving. With that said, I clearly don't fit the profile in the article perfectly, since most of my fellow emigrants are going to the US, which has those same issues.
trnglina··on Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M
Most of Tokyo's mass transit network is absolutely neither isolated nor enclosed, and operates with vastly higher frequencies.

Here's is the timetable for a suburban station on a commuter lines: https://train-cloud.navitime.biz/en/odakyu/railroads/timetab...

On a weekday at peak hours, there are up to 20+ trains an hour, with commuter trains continuing directly into Metro systems, and directly onto different commuter lines on the other end.

trnglina··on The New Collabora Office for Desktop
Except for all the people who use Google Docs, I suppose.
trnglina··on Replacing JavaScript with Just HTML
I often use different light/dark settings between apps and my system. Just because I want system UIs to be dark, for example, doesn't mean I want to read long pages of white-on-black prose on your blog.
trnglina··on My dad could still be alive, but he's not
Healthcare is one of the exclusive powers of the provinces, as laid out in the constitution. There are things the federal government can do, such as provide money, but provincial leaders complaining about lack of federal involvement do so in bad faith; they would certainly complain louder if the federal government overstepped their bounds. It's worth pointing out that taxation and borrowing are also constitutionally protected powers of the province.
trnglina··on How to self-host a web font from Google Fonts
Please educate me if I'm missing something!

From memory, what I would do is simply download the original ttfs or otfs, run them through woff2 (https://github.com/google/woff2), and then write the @font-face declarations for each weight/style variation. Variable fonts make this even easier, since you can get by with just the one declaration.

One could further optimise them for size with fonttools, to do stuff like subsetting by unicode ranges (https://github.com/fonttools/fonttools), but that's quite optional. Unless your font includes CJK, it's probably not that big to begin with.

trnglina··on How to self-host a web font from Google Fonts
What made you give up? As the article describes, self hosting fonts is as easy as making the static font files available and then adding a few lines of CSS. What solution would you want Google to offer?
trnglina··on No Space Left to Run: China's Transnational Repression of Uyghurs
Saying that Chinese people are okay, and are not necessarily represented by the actions of the Chinese state, isn't about anything more than trying to prevent violence and hate from being targeted towards ethically East Asian-looking people. There is precedence for this kind of violence, and if we're angry at China for human rights abuses, we should not breed an environment in which the human rights of Chinese people are put at risk in other countries.
trnglina··on AMD Quietly Launches Recycled Xbox Series X APU as 4700S Desktop Kit
According to the article, "APU with a disabled or defective iGPU" and "the AMD 4700S lacks display outputs".
trnglina··on State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?
Built-in Windows controls, like buttons, scroll bars, etc. are updated with each system release. However, they are relatively inflexible, and no one uses WinApi anyway, so most frameworks and apps build their own components, with varying dedication to emulating the "native" style. Built-in controls also don't perform much in the way of layout (I believe the only way to position child HWNDs remains manual absolute positions?) so while your button might look native, your collection of two buttons won't.

My guess is MacOS's consistency comes from some combination of developer incentives, and UI toolkit design.

trnglina··on Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life
What is the use of wealth, if not to increase one's quality of life?
trnglina··on Firefox 89 Tab Appearance
It displays for me, in place of the favicon (but I'm on nightly, so this might be a more recent change). Here's what it looks like for me: https://imgur.com/a/EwaKsNt
trnglina··on Text editing hates you too (2019)
Sure, but not all people who use computers are programmers, and programmers make up a small minority of computer users. Much of the value in computers come from augmenting other workloads. There are no shortage of people composing e-mails and documents, or consuming content, in non-English languages. Probably more than there are fluent English users.
trnglina··on Dangerous Ransomware Technique
I have an app installed that essentially draws over the entire view to darken the screen, while all interactions pass through transparently. It can't draw over certain areas, like some popups and the notification bar, but most of that wouldn't matter for malicious interactions.
trnglina··on TikTok’s Chinese owner offers to forego stake to clinch U.S. deal – sources
Apple, maybe, but Google services don't operate in China.
trnglina··on What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite
> by the way, in contrast with the... Start Menu!

Well, good news! I don't know when this might've changed (I have animations enabled), but I just tested it on Windows 10 2004, and the start menu doesn't animate with animations off.

trnglina··on How does Chrome decide what to highlight when you double-click Japanese text?
I agree, there's definitely flexibility in what I expect, and what other people will likely expect. Here's the thing though: when I double-click "double-click", I could reasonably expect "double" "click" or "double-click" would be selected. I wouldn't expect it to select everything between the last and next punctuation characters (as an imperfect analogy).

For me at least, double-clicking is like fuzzy string matching. It's an imprecise behaviour by nature, but should be designed to be useful. Firefox's behaviour in the case of Japanese, but especially Chinese, often isn't useful, not because it doesn't perfectly reflect linguistic expectations, but because it usually selects too much--meaning you can't correct your selection by moving the cursor back and forth, and instead, have to stop and select using a different method.

Take the following passage:

もうこんなことは終わってほしいと願うばかりだ

Different people may break apart もうこんなことは differently, but it's hard to argue that it's one word. Chrome (and Word) separate it like this: もう こんな こと は, and whether or not you agree that each one of those parts are words, simply splitting もうこんなことは into parts semi-logically makes it smoother to edit (for me, at least! I understand most people might not be as dependent on double-click selection).

The same behaviour for Chinese is so useless that it's not even worth mentioning, since you'll always select either a large part of a sentence, or an entire sentence at once. I mean, I love the word 匹配的近似度用如下方法来度量.

trnglina··on How does Chrome decide what to highlight when you double-click Japanese text?
I think it depends on how engrained the double-click highlight is for you. For me, I double-click by default, since I almost always want to select at a word boundary in English. As a result, when I need to select Chinese or Japanese text, I'm always annoyed when my double click (which, in my mind, should always select a word) selects a nonsensical sub-sentence instead, and I have to then re-select it manually.
trnglina··on How does Chrome decide what to highlight when you double-click Japanese text?
I use double-click highlighting, and the reason is mostly selecting passages of text when editing. Double-click highlighting makes it so I don't have to find the precise character boundaries for the first and last words in the passage. Instead, I can just double click the first word, roughly move my mouse to hover over the last, and copy or delete that entire passage.

Firefox's approach is fairly useless in this regard. Even if it's predictable from a technical perspective, it's not predictable for a reader who naturally processes semantic breaks rather than technical ones. Unlike in English, where a space is both semantic and visual, hiragana-kanji boundaries often don't mean anything. As a result, for me at least, Firefox's breaks feel a lot more random than Chrome's, which, while dodgy, are often fine.

Having used Firefox as my main browser since 2006, I remember when I discovered this feature in Chrome, and being shocked at how much of an effect that minor improvement had for me. It's not a deal-breaker, certainly, but it's become my one big annoyance with Firefox.

trnglina··on How does Chrome decide what to highlight when you double-click Japanese text?
Firefox, in contrast, breaks at script boundaries, so it'll select runs of Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Not nearly as useful, and definitely makes copying Japanese text especially annoying.
trnglina··on Meadow F7 micro board on pre-sale (bare metal .NET Standard 2.0)
According to the Kickstarter:

"From the very inception, we had a vision to fix a lot of the issues with hardware, starting by getting Mono (the open-source runtime that powers Xamarin) running on a microcontroller in order to bring a modern runtime to the class of computing that powers real IoT."

Which would seem to indicate it runs Mono.

trnglina··on Meadow F7 micro board on pre-sale (bare metal .NET Standard 2.0)
I'm going to argue that, while the .NET environment may be unfamiliar, it's as good (if not better!) than the NodeJS environment for "getting stuff done." You may have fewer libraries (depending on what you're looking for), but with .NET Standard 2, you need fewer of them. The standard library has support for everything from Memory Mapped Files [0], to Parallel loops [1], every collection type under the sun [2], globalisation [3], and HTTP applications [4].

Memory management is just as automatic as well (they seem to just be using the mono runtime).

[0]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.io.memory...

[1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.threading...

[2]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.collectio...

[3]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.globaliza...

[4]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.net.http?...

trnglina··on Text Editing Hates You Too
> But if Latin-style scripts are so much easier to input into computers, and if computers are not just the wave of the future but the present as well

But the hard part isn't supporting _a_ script, it's supporting _all_ scripts (or at least, all relevant scripts, in our modern interconnected age). It's only moderately more complicated, even with existing latin-centric tools, to only support a single script. Heck, If you only support Chinese + Japanese for example: you can always assume monospacing, which makes layout a breeze; line-wrapping rules are extremely simple [0]; and word-breaking (and associated headaches, like hyphenation and inter-word spacing) is practically a non-factor.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_breaking_rules_in_East_As...

trnglina··on Text Editing Hates You Too
I can speak a little on Chinese and Japanese. In neither of these countries, English (or sometimes even Latin) literacy is high enough to replace the domestic language. (And anyway, maybe it's just me, but reading romanized Chinese or Japanese is exhausting.)

With China, the market's so big that there's an entire ecosystem of homegrown (or Chinese-modified) software and websites, everything from office suites to web browsers, and I have to imagine those support Chinese input just fine.

With Japanese, generally the same software and sites are used, but Japanese support is also pretty good across common software.

Some niche or open source software struggle with IMEs in general, but in those cases, the solution is just to not use that software.

trnglina··on Flutter looks good, but is painful
UWP is hardly consistent. Just as a quick example, the context menu in the start menu is slightly different from the context menu for the task bar, which are both very different from the context menu(s!) which appear in the Windows Mail app. Or how the context menu in the start menu can exit the bounds of the start menu, but most popups/menus in UWP apps are fully bound to their parents.
trnglina··on Why we are withdrawing the NHS Common User Interface
> Is this not what is being withdrawn?

What's being withdrawn is their original CUI, linked in the article [0]. From what I can tell, this is very distinct from their new digital service manual, which seems to be replacing the old CUI.

> ...but this would need to be either extended or abstracted to be applicable to, say, administrative systems.

Based on nothing more than a rough skim of the CUI, admittedly, it seems like the original was a very web/interface-oriented design system in the first place. A focus on web components makes sense, since administrative systems can be implemented with a web-based frontend, and web design systems can be adapted to other user interfaces, because they provide a set of baseline, expected behaviours to replicate.

[0]: https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160921140920/ht...

trnglina··on Observable’s Not JavaScript
Interestingly enough, from my quick tests, the highlighting behaviour works as normal in Firefox, but not in Chrome.
trnglina··on Request HN: Something nice for reaching 1000 karma
Here's a CSS-only hacky version I threw together:

  #hnmain td td:last-child .pagetop {
    font-size: 0;
  }
  #hnmain td td:last-child .pagetop a {
    font-size: 10pt;
  }
  #hnmain td td:last-child .pagetop a:first-child::after {
    content: ' | ';
  }
Page 1 of 2Next →