Current news media is even more narrowly focused on the three hot news stories of the day with 24-hour repetitive commentary all funneled into the narrative of the day.
In 1990 I used AutoLISP to setup a tool that the state legislature would use for redistricting after the census. The AutoLISP let them interactively assign counties to districts while seeing the voter numbers and then export it to a CSV file which was read into a database. They could also export from that database back into AutoCAD using AutoLISP.
Redistricting with AutoLISP - that's a use case I never imagined. Interactive county assignment with live voter counts, bidirectional CSV sync. Democracy infrastructure in a CAD macro.
The southern end of the Atlas, the Anti-Atlas range, is from the same formation as the Appalachans. The rest of the Atlas came from a different (later?) event.
Much of the cost of Alexa wasn't the data center costs, as Alexa was not, until recently, an AI. Amazon lost tons of money selling cheap Echo speakers at below cost expecting people would use Alexa on those to buy things. Turns out, people don't like to buy things by yelling at a speaker.
Did you know that 90% of submissions to arXiv are in TeX format, mostly LaTeX? That poses a unique accessibility challenge: to accurately convert from TeX—a very extensible language used in myriad unique ways by authors—to HTML, a language that is much more accessible to screen readers and text-to-speech software, screen magnifiers, and mobile devices. In addition to the technical challenges, the conversion must be both rapid and automated in order to maintain arXiv’s core service of free and fast dissemination.
No I mean _arXiv_ has had experimental support for generating HTML versions of papers for years now. If you visit arXiv, you'll see a lot of papers have generated HTML alongside the usual PDF, so I'm trying to understand whether the article discussed any new developments. It seems like it's not new at all
It's kind of fun to compare this formulation with the seemingly contradictory official arXiv argument for submitting the TeX source [1]:
> 1. TeX has many advantages that make it ideal as a format for the archives: It is plain text, it is compact, it is freely available for all platforms, it produces extremely high-quality output, and it retains contextual information.
> 2. It is thus more likely to be a good source from which to generate newer formats, e.g., HTML, MathML, various ePub formats, etc. [...]
Not that I disagree with the effort and it surely is a unique challenge to, at scale, convert the Turing complete macro language TeX to something other than PDF. And, at the same time, the task would be monumentally more difficult if only the generated PDFs were available. So both are right at the same time.
Working with both at the same time makes their strengths and pitfalls shine. It's like that dual-boot computer where you're constantly in the wrong OS.
HTML has better separation of concerns than latex.
Latex does typesetting a lot better than html.
HTML layout can differ wildly in the same document.
Latex documents are easier to layout in the first place.
There are pretty often problems with figure size and with sections being too narrow or wide (for comfortable reading). The PDF versions are more consistently well-laid-out.
From my perspective, all browsers are fast enough and within a couple of percent the same performance. I value features, privacy, etc. More than raw speed.
Yes, there are some toxic people here, as in any community or population, but there are also thoughtful and compassionate people here. This article seems to be mostly filled with the latter. I don’t know what your experience on HN has been but I encourage you to look beyond the that unpleasent post and consider the humane majority on this pot before you make your decision.
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