Hacker News Reader

zczcon Why 11 days disappeared in 1752

Not all orthodox churches: Greek and Bulgarian churches are on Gregorian calendar (technically on Revised Julian[1] which is aligned with Gregorian until the year 2800).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_Julian_calendar

zczcon 68k.news: A Netscape 1.1 makeover of Google News

Also utf-8 (or any Unicode) wasn't supported by most (all?) Netscape versions. Falling back to default Latin1 works with English text though.

zczcon Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)

Earth's atmospheric hydrogen is oxidized

zczcon Shitbowl: The algorithmically powered in-home physical caching platform

"Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word" ― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

zczcon Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

"The Communists" in Niemöller's "First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist" [1] were not "the people advocating for economical models", but (in his eyes) violent revolutionists who set the parliament building on fire.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_fire

zczcon Parler partially reappears with support from Russian technology firm

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Gilmore

zczcon XMHell: Handling 38GB of UTF-16 XML with Rust

XSLT 3.0 streaming with Saxon requires Saxon-EE (closed-source Enterprise Edition), see https://www.saxonica.com/html/documentation/sourcedocs/strea...

Are there Open source xstl 3.0 processors with streaming support?

zczcon Security by obscurity is underrated

Security by obscurity was the perfect way to send the largest diamond across the world:

"Due to its immense value, detectives were assigned to a steamboat that was rumoured to be carrying the stone, and a parcel was ceremoniously locked in the captain's safe and guarded on the entire journey. It was a diversionary tactic – the stone on that ship was fake, meant to attract those who would be interested in stealing it. Cullinan was sent to the United Kingdom in a plain box via registered post." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cullinan_Diamond

zczcon Exxon accurately predicted 2019's climate change and CO2 emission in 1982

[video]

zczcon Never Use White Text on Black: Astygmatism and Conference Slides (2017)

It's even worse for people with multifocal intraocular lenses implanted after cataract surgery: they see strong glares and halos around light objects on dark background (including text), and unlike astigmatism this cannot be corrected with glasses or contacts

zczcon Calibre 4.0

Just updated. Alas, the new viewer still does not provide nondestructive viewing. Open file, press PgDn, exit, and the viewed file is silently changed. The viewer writes current position in the viewed file itself (META-INF/calibre_bookmarks.txt).

UPDATE: just found out there is now a checkbox in the viewer preferences: "Keep a copy of annotations/bookmarks in the e-book file, for easy sharing". If unchecked, the viewed files are kept intact. Nice!

zczcon Microplastics found in 93% of bottled water tested in global study

Water is commonly treated with membranes. Membranes are made from polymers and have with sub-micron dimensions. Could this be the source of microplastics?

zczcon The Rise of the Comfort College

Part 2: https://news.yahoo.com/comfort-conquered-college-140014048.h...

zczcon French city of Dunkirk tests out free transport

It's free for registered residents only

zczcon French city of Dunkirk tests out free transport

Tallinn (bigger city than Dunkirk) has free public transport since 2013, and since 2018 it expanded to the whole Estonia https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/estonia-is-making-pub...

zczcon Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

The idea behind Markdown Here is good, but it has some issues like keeping a copy of the markup text base-encoded in some html attribute which can be lead to unintentionally leaking full text while forwarding part of the message.

zczcon Stop Infinite Scrolling

Probably done using rel="next", rel="prev", like this:

  <link rel="next" href="/page/2">

see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Link_types

zczcon Use plaintext email

You can use markdown with https://markdown-here.com/. It allows composing emails in markdown and sending email as multipart message with plain text markdown plus rendered html. Discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15646425

zczcon The Feynman Lectures on Physics now free

Works for me (Firefox and Chrome). The footnote on the page says: "This HTML5-based edition features LaTeX equations rendered by MathJax JavaScript, and scalable vector graphic (SVG) figures. Your browser must support javascript and permit scripts from mathjax.org. LocalStorage must be enabled"

zczcon Ask HN: Best way to test accessibility of a website?

Wave also has firefox extension http://wave.webaim.org/extension/ and webapp http://wave.webaim.org/

zczcon How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner

(2012)

zczcon China harvested organs from political prisoners, says tribunal

https://pastebin.com/WvYnX5Vx

zczcon Experiment that ended in 1767 still linked to higher incomes, education levels

In that times the primary goal of all catholic missions was to spread Catholicism, not to provide welfare to "pagans"

zczcon Android Security Auditing: Investigating Unauthorized Screenshots

Correction: FLAG_SECURE doesn't make app "less responsive". It makes it appear as a header with a blank rectangle beneath in Recent apps, which lessens the UX but not responsiveness

zczcon Experiment that ended in 1767 still linked to higher incomes, education levels

The study compares effects of activity by Jesuits and by Franciscans. Both are Catholic orders so the difference is not related to the religion, but to the focus on education in Jesuits missions

zczcon DIY induction stove – Frying eggs with magnets

Induction cooker doesn't work on grid AC frequency (50-60Hz), it converts grid AC to DC then converts it to high frequency (24 kHz), so possibly induction cooker can be modified to run straight from DC power

zczcon So Good They Can't Ignore You

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countersignaling

zczcon Irony Alert: Disney About 'Overzealous Copyright Holders'

And The Lion King was partly based on Kimba anime

zczcon El Fuego Viviente Chili Sauce

Another place for open source recipes is wikibooks:

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Table_of_Contents

zczcon My favorite apps on F-Droid

My favorites are:

Ghost Commander - two panel file manager with text editor Call Recorder - records calls

Termux - terminal emulator with packages

Hacker's Keyboard - full keyboard, good for terminal and remote