Re-shaping the context sometimes involves severe pressures like "wtf is this ugly crap?" or "did I just spot you laying a turd in my codebase again?" and other strong forms of disapproval, mixed with "hmm not sure I like the sound of that"s, to "yea that's much better" to pull it back in the other direction.

The trick is to shape the flow before the tide comes in and you end up like King Canute

I guess you could save the state to a file on SIGINT, flush what's been written and pick it back up again if the state file exists when you restart, and use the CRCs of the files to abort if things have changed. I don't fancy doing that for so many versions of RAR, but it would be a cool feature to add it to an `xz` fork. I like the idea.

I can't really say it works in every case as I honestly didn't spend that much time on it. But it works in the majority of cases. There's likely some nasty bugs hiding in there.

My main goal here was an experiment to see how far I could push the technique, and learn things along the way. Regardless of whether people dare to use it commercially or not, we have interoperability for the foreseeable future. As an archivist/computing historian I think that's important.

It's not fast and it's not pretty, but it works.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48126675

Points: 94

# Comments: 84

It's a pretty big file, so I compressed it down to 11mb:

https://www.docdroid.net/A5g0tzk/les-animaux-compressed.pdf

I think the most important thing to learn is enthusiasm, if you've not got that then proper methods are of no use. This book looks like it'll be great tool for nurturing that.

It could have been that she then searched for a charger and being a small company we all shared an external IP address, that we also shared the ads... or it could have been that spy software on my phone had sold our conversation to advertisers. Either way, mic privileges were locked down and ad and tracker blocking efforts doubled after that.

But Windows Defender quite rightly still quarantines the file.

The way that their library database works is by linking a book number to a file's md5 sum. On the filesystem they are stored something like `$drive:\$batch\$sum` where `$drive` is a Windows drive letter, `$batch` is the primary key of the document rounded to the nearest 1k, 10k or 100k depending on collection and `$sum` is the `md5sum` of the file data. The archive's file data is shared via torrents, usenet and other means in those batches, and to keep that in sync they have a policy of the primary key and sum of each file being immutable.

So if you do happen to download the literary works of mankind via their torrents, you have to do so with your antivirus turned off and hope nobody has uploaded anything too illegal over the last decade.