Hacker News: oevi

New comment by oevi in "A writer fabricated a series of stories for Atlas Obscura"

oevi — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 07:51:02 +0000

There was a similar scandal surrounding German news magazine „Der Spiegel“ with at least 14 articles fabricated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claas_Relotius

New comment by oevi in "The XML spec is 25 years old today"

oevi — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 11:05:01 +0000

XSLT 3.0 allows streaming for large XML files. See e.g. https://www.saxonica.com/html/documentation10/sourcedocs/str...

New comment by oevi in "Voith Schneider Propeller"

oevi — Fri, 05 Mar 2021 10:10:55 +0000

The German Wikipedia article has some very nice animations to demonstrate the principle: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voith-Schneider-Antrieb

New comment by oevi in "iPhone 12 Models Won't Include Charger in Box, Power Adapter Sold Separately"

oevi — Mon, 29 Jun 2020 09:46:17 +0000

The article says a Lightning to USB-C cable will still be included. So you can use any USB-C charger which can delivery the necessary power (as with the iPhone 11).

New comment by oevi in "Animating URLs with JavaScript and Emojis"

oevi — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 07:00:55 +0000

This got me thinking about some standardized control elements websites could put in the address / menu bar.

Something like media controls, progress bars or even consent banners. This way they would have an unified appearance and could be user scriptable.

New comment by oevi in "Why was it so hard to take a picture of a black hole?"

oevi — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 06:35:39 +0000

A very good explanation on what we are looking at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo

New comment by oevi in "Zero-shot transfer across 93 languages"

oevi — Wed, 23 Jan 2019 09:20:52 +0000

In the field of Technical Writing there are whole books written on how to write for human and machine translation. Main takeaway: consistency and unambiguity.

Controlled languages try to solve this with constraints. There is quite a bit of researcha round this topic: https://scholar.google.de/scholar?q=controlled+language+tran...

New comment by oevi in "“Diagram of All Space and Time” by Carl Sagan (1960s?)"

oevi — Wed, 12 Dec 2018 08:08:47 +0000

"The X axis represents time [...] and the Y axis represents scale" - Isn't it the other way round?

New comment by oevi in "Show HN: A mobile-friendly, web-based, countries of the world game"

oevi — Mon, 10 Dec 2018 15:26:29 +0000

Another good "countries of the world game" which is more based on maps is: http://click-that-hood.com/

Especially the Africa variant: http://www.youdontknowafrica.com/

New comment by oevi in "Amazon in Running to Acquire Landmark Movie Chain"

oevi — Thu, 16 Aug 2018 08:50:47 +0000

A bit like Daimler-Benz between 1985-95 when they tried to get into aerospace and electronics under CEO Edzard Reuter, which failed miserably and cost the company around 25 Billion dollars. Some called it the biggest destruction of capital in Germany in peacetime

New comment by oevi in "“Pinterest needs to be removed from Google IMO”"

oevi — Mon, 19 Mar 2018 10:47:07 +0000

Because it implies an association with the W3C

New comment by oevi in "Most images of black holes are illustrations. Here’s what our telescopes capture"

oevi — Wed, 28 Feb 2018 09:07:02 +0000

Black holes are an excellent example for so called "cognitive metaphors".

Because we found no better analogy, we named them "holes" despite the fact that they are basically the opposite: an object with enormous mass.

This influences our thinking and our language when we discuss problems concerning black holes. We talk about "inside the black hole", "light cannot escape the black hole" or "spitting things out of the black hole".

I think it is really interesting how these cognitive metaphors can sometime limit our ability to think about a problem, because they often restrict the properties of the described thing to the properties of the analogy.

New comment by oevi in "How Dropbox handles downgrades"

oevi — Fri, 23 Feb 2018 13:55:22 +0000

It is also interesting how the handle forced downgrades. I just lost some GBs from previous promotions (like Dropbox Campus Cup) and are now stuck with the following situation:

- all files are still there, downloads are possible

- they disabled syncing between devices and sharing

- in case of upgrading to a paid plan I can continue as before

New comment by oevi in "Taiwan ban single-use plastic straws, plastic bags, disposable utensils by 2030"

oevi — Thu, 22 Feb 2018 14:57:53 +0000

Here is a suprisingly comprehensive list of countries which have programs to reduce plastic bags: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_lightweight_plast...