Hacker News: mediumdeviation

New comment by mediumdeviation in "Show HN: JavaScript-first, open-source WYSIWYG DOCX editor"

mediumdeviation — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:33:42 +0000

We went out and used our editor against our and customer's documents. The Open part of OOXML makes as much sense as the Open in OpenAI. Microsoft made OOXML available to fend off an antitrust lawsuit, there is no incentive for them to make it actually easy to build competing editors off their specification.

FWIW the bug I found is that your comment parser assumes the w:date attribute represents a useful timestamp of when comments are made. It does not - a bug in Word causes it to save it as ISO8601 local time but _without timezone_, rendering it useless if more than one user across different timezone edits the document. Instead, you need to cross reference the comment with a newer comment part and find a dateUtc attribute. The above is, of course, completely undocumented.

New comment by mediumdeviation in "Show HN: JavaScript-first, open-source WYSIWYG DOCX editor"

mediumdeviation — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 23:12:17 +0000

Ah these poor fools. Having built this exact product (OOXML compatible editor in React) before, it took all of two minutes to find a bug. The issue is that the OOXML spec is not in fact definitive - Word is, and trying to implement it from the spec will produce something that works maybe 80% of the time then fall over completely when you hit one of hundreds of minor, undocumented edge cases. Assuming of course that CC did not just hallucinate something. And then there's the more fundamental problem that HTML/CSS has unresolvable incompatibilities with OOXML. This is why Google Docs for instance use canvas for rendering.

New comment by mediumdeviation in "Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC"

mediumdeviation — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 04:48:50 +0000

Also while searching for SimCity screenshots I found someone recreating NYC in SimCity 4 https://www.reddit.com/r/simcity4/comments/12dkxey/check_out...

New comment by mediumdeviation in "Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?"

mediumdeviation — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 06:01:31 +0000

Another fun fact - lodash/fp doesn't deduplicate with lodash when bundled. For a couple of months I was wondering why our app had bundled two copies of lodash. I dismissed it as a measurement artifact at first. It took so long to realize there was actually two copies of lodash and it was because one developer on our team had a preference for fp syntax.

New comment by mediumdeviation in "Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?"

mediumdeviation — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 05:01:23 +0000

Links can have that as their href and it will also work as you'd expect. It's the telephone equivalent of the more well-known mailto: scheme

New comment by mediumdeviation in "Ask HN: Weird archive.today behavior?"

mediumdeviation — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 04:44:23 +0000

It's not random, setting the query string to a new value on every fetch is a cache busting technique - it's trying to prevent the browser from caching the page, presumably to increase bandwidth usage.

New comment by mediumdeviation in "Ask HN: Weird archive.today behavior?"

mediumdeviation — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 04:25:16 +0000

Pretty sure that blog is hosted on Wordpress.com infrastructure so it's not like the blog owner would even notice unless it generates so much traffic that WP itself notices.

That said I don't think there's many non-malicious explanation for this, I would suggest writing to HN and see about blocking submissions from the domain hn@ycombinator.com

New comment by mediumdeviation in "Date is out, Temporal is in"

mediumdeviation — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 18:40:41 +0000

Note that this is 51kb, it's not exactly lightweight https://bundlephobia.com/package/@js-temporal/polyfill@0.5.1. Still good for forward compatibility or on the server, but for smaller apps it's significant.

New comment by mediumdeviation in "Fifty problems with standard web APIs in 2025"

mediumdeviation — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 00:37:35 +0000

Yeah, supporting iOS 12 in 2025 is odd. I was investigating browser support levels just recently for a library and also settled on iOS 16 as a reasonable level.

For reference, iOS 12.x and below are used 0.33% globally https://browsersl.ist/#q=safari+%3C+13+or+ios+%3C+13. Selecting iOS 16 would still exclude less than 1% globally https://browsersl.ist/#q=safari+%3C+16+or+ios+%3C+16. In both cases the vast majority would be older iOS which is unfortunate because I assume they're on older devices with no upgrade path, but you have to decide on the transpile/polyfill cutoff at some point and browser support has an extremely long tail.

New comment by mediumdeviation in "Super-Flat ASTs"

mediumdeviation — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 19:51:43 +0000

For anyone confused by why the text says the performance is improving between each graph but the lines don't seem to show that - the color for each key and the scale changes between graphs.

New comment by mediumdeviation in "A67z"

mediumdeviation — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 04:43:23 +0000

Since it didn't gain traction the first time round, I'll just leave this here:

> Clad Labs launches Chad IDE, the first ever "brainrot IDE" https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/OgV-chad-ide-the-first-...

New comment by mediumdeviation in "Avería: The Average Font (2011)"

mediumdeviation — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 01:05:43 +0000

It's because the website is using cufon, a very early attempt at supporting custom fonts on the web using HTML canvas - basically every word you see is rendered as an image rather than text. The end result does not look good on hi-dpi screens like modern Macbook displays, probably they did not exist back then. The site mentions Google Font has a hosted version of it now and you can look at how it is meant to be rendered https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Averia+Libre

New comment by mediumdeviation in "Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste"

mediumdeviation — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 23:50:55 +0000

It's the scanline effect, here's three lines of JS to disable it from the developer console

    s=document.createElement('style');
    s.textContent='body::after{display: none !important}';
    document.body.appendChild(s)

New comment by mediumdeviation in "US government shuts down after Senate fails to pass last-ditch funding plan"

mediumdeviation — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 05:29:08 +0000

I think you mean congresswoman, Adelita Grijalva https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelita_Grijalva

> On September 23, 2025, Grijalva was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in a special election to succeed her father, defeating Republican nominee Daniel Butierez.

New comment by mediumdeviation in "Targetting specific characters with CSS rules"

mediumdeviation — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 19:35:18 +0000

Since the article doesn't mention this, the intended use for this property is to act as a hint to the browser about what characters are supported by the font, and if the page doesn't have those characters then the browser can choose to not download the font. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/%40font-fac...

This also mean you don't technically even need this property to achieve this, you can also recompile a font with limited glyphs, this property just makes it easier to do this with an existing font file, though of course the user would be downloading a lot of unused glyphs.

New comment by mediumdeviation in "Top UN legal investigators conclude Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza"

mediumdeviation — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 05:18:06 +0000

The news cycle is moving fast enough that shockingly enough this news is already pushed off the frontpage of these news sites, but the article is there if you dig a little.

- BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8641wv0n4go

- The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/16/israel-committ...

- NPR: https://www.npr.org/2025/09/16/g-s1-89014/israel-gaza-genoci...

New comment by mediumdeviation in "Web apps in a single, portable, self-updating, vanilla HTML file"

mediumdeviation — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 15:14:32 +0000

There’s some discussion in the specs here https://w3c.github.io/webappsec-secure-contexts/#is-origin-t...

> In particular, the user agent SHOULD treat file URLs as potentially trustworthy.

> User agents which prioritize security over such niceties MAY choose to more strictly assign trust in a way which excludes file.

A potentially trustworthy URL is a secure context: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/webappapis.html#secur...

So this is a matter of browsers not implementing it, probably because there’s just not a lot of demand for it.

New comment by mediumdeviation in "What does Palantir actually do?"

mediumdeviation — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 07:53:58 +0000

> The main concern about the numbers is that they are probably a massive undercount. Every hospital in Gaza has been bombed by the IDF, and the healthcare system is barely functioning at all any more. Beyond that, there is rubble everywhere, and nobody knows how many people lie dead underneath it.

Just to back this up - this study published in the Lancet estimates a 41% undercount for deaths up to June 30, 2024.

The study: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

The Guardian's summary: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/10/gaza-death-tol...

New comment by mediumdeviation in "Show HN: Reactive: A React Book for the Reluctant (written by Claude)"

mediumdeviation — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 03:34:22 +0000

Please for goodness sake just read React's docs.

https://react.dev/learn

The new docs are very good, they address common questions most devs have, up to fairly complex cases. The "book" unsurprisingly reads like a expert beginner's take, and there are a decent number of poor or missing explanations and code that's not really best practice. It's also really verbose for things that React's own docs do a better job of explaining.

Users claim Discord's age verification can be tricked with video game characters

mediumdeviation — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 04:23:36 +0000

Article URL: https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/07/25/discord-video-game-characters-age-verification-checks-uk-online-safety-act/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44691312

Points: 157

# Comments: 185