ipsi

Interesting! I have a partially-built, related, tool, to extract "words" from e-books, so I could build flashcard lists and make sure I knew the majority of words that were used - most of them would be common words but every book has a decently-sized selection of specialised vocabulary. I did think about trying to get something fancy done with an LLM or an NLP for figuring out the separable verbs, but in the end, I took a very... brute-force approach, basically grabbing the final word in the "phrase", then prepending that to every word in the phrase one by one and asking "is this a known separable verb?" - I'm not sure how well it worked, but that's a different story.

Related, I also saw this project a little while ago: https://smallstep.com/blog/build-a-tiny-ca-with-raspberry-pi...

Which looks quite interesting to have HTTPS for my internal-only pages without need to deal with an external service, although you have to be very careful to setup your certs correctly with "Name Constraints" (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5280#section-4.2.1.10) to avoid the risk of someone being able to MitM everything if they're able to get in and start issuing themselves certificates.

It's pretty clear that it's "Based on the Farnsworth Munsell 100 Hue Test," and "this is not a replacement for the full test!" I think if you did particularly poorly on the online test then it's worth looking at whether you need to do the full test, as you might have colour blindness (or a terrible monitor). But a perfect score isn't super-meaningful.

Yeah, I'm also in Germany (although not German) and installed Paperless because of this!

I think more than a few of these projects are started and/or maintained by Germans due to the astonishing number of documents received - e.g., paperless-ng appears to have been done by a German, although neither the original Paperless nor Paperless NGX immediately appear to be.

Kinda - at the moment I'm receiving _a lot_ of documents, mostly as PDFs via E-Mail (some the original digital version, some scans of physical copies), but some via post as well.

I've only added documents I've received this year (plus a couple of dozen documents going further back), and I've got ~250 in there, with a total of ~2.5m words (although I think word-count is a fuzzy concept in German).

I've posted a top level comment in more detail, but yeah, it's helpful to me.

I've spun up a copy of this recently (within the last month) and it's already proving helpful.

I've purchased a new-build home in Germany, and I'm currently in the stage between "purchased" and "ready for move-in," and if you've ever purchased a Neubau in Germany you know how much paperwork is involved - I get so many documents over email, many of which are scanned (to preserve the wet signature and stamps), and some of which I need to copy into a translator, that this is incredibly helpful. It checks my email, grabs PDFs, straightens them, OCRs them, adds a correspondent, tags them, and makes them available through a web UI.

I also appreciate the full-text search (for all that it might struggle if I had tens of thousands of documents) as I've had to go and try to find particular documents where the name of the document I've received might be a synonym for what the other person is asking for, but the word they're asking for is at least used in the text.

I'll also set it up to pull documents from my NAS as well, where the scanner writes to, as I also receive a number of documents via mail (that I also occasionally need to translate or copy/paste from).

There are also some limitations that annoy me:

* I really wish the email filters were more flexible - right now, I have to have three filters, one of PDFs, one for JPEGs, and one for PNGs, so I wish I could just set a regex for the attachment name. This one annoys me enough that if I ever have time I'd look at doing a PR for it (assuming the filtering is done locally and not on the IMAP server). * I'd also like to be able to setup rules to tag documents based on the email domain (e.g., house-builders get tagged as "house-builder, house") without having to manage a gigantic explosion of rules. In theory the ML should handle that, but... I'm mistrustful of ML. We'll see in a few months if I was too hasty in my judgement or not. * I'd like to retain slightly more information about the correspondent, like both name and email address (there's no consistency about who has their From line as "Name <email>" and who's just "email", even within the same company), both for de-duplication of correspondents and domain-based searching. * I wish I could share documents more easily than downloading it and re-uploading it to my email client (or mounting the folders and trying to find the right document, but that has its own set of problems). This one of those problems that's really easy to state, but potentially quite difficult to actually implement - could a web application add a PDF to the clipboard in such a way that GMail, say, would understand what was happening and add it as an attachment when pasted?

Overall though, I'm pretty happy with it, and finding it useful so quickly was somewhat surprising.

I recall running into the odd one or two like that - I have vague memories that it was because searching was _slow_ and it didn't take more than a few people using it to bring the site to its knees. Restricting it to logged in users helped, and I think I saw some sites restrict searching to only post bodies for a period too, for similar reasons.

I haven't run into it recently, but I have at least vague memories of it happening in the past.

> This deserves a separate discussion. I doubt many English speakers (let alone those who don't live in a particular anglophone country) care to distinguish between English dialects. To us presence of a huge number of these (don't forget en-AU, en-TT, en-ZW etc - there are more!) in the options lists brings only annoyance, especially when one chooses some non-US one and this opens another can of worms.

I definitely do. The biggest difference, as everyone else, has pointed out is the US vs UK spellings.

Realistically, though, beyond that country is a poor indicator for everything else. I want to use DD/MM/YYYY date format in English, but DD.MM.YYYY date format in German. I want to use $1,000 in English, but 1.000 $ in German. This isn't dependent on the country I live in, this is dependant on a combination of a country and language - that could be the country I'm living in, or the country I grew up in (mostly US date format vs not), and it's either the language I'm actively typing in, or the language of the document I'm reading, or the language I'm thinking in (but a computer can't exactly handle that).

Trying to guess the correct combination is tricky, especially if a document is in two languages (e.g., a quotation), and users are lazy and won't switch their IME unless they have to.

What this means in slightly more practical terms is that setting a single "locale" for my device doesn't make sense, but rather I should be able to choose a locale per language (or possibly spelling preferences by language and formatting options by language as separate choices). I'd then pick a language to use the device in, and it would use that languages locale, and tell apps that this language is the preferred language. If an app doesn't provide my preferred language, pull the preferred locale from settings for a language it does support, otherwise use the default set by developers. For some apps, it's a bit more complex, particularly if I'm creating content. GMail or Office would be two good examples, where the UI language might be in English, but the emails or documents are in German, or a combination of German and English.

Even then, I'm sure there are people who need something even more flexible than that.

At the moment, if I set my language to English but my Country to Germany on my iPhone, for example, things occasionally get confused. My UK banking app, for example, pulled the decimal separator from my locale settings for a while and then refused to work because "£9,79" (or whatever it was) isn't a valid amount of money, and I couldn't see a way to fix that without switching my Country in the phone settings. I imagine they fixed it by ignoring my configured locale and always using en-GB, thus defeating the whole point of a locale in the first place.

So yeah, these days it's fairly common to not have a single "locale" that you work in - it's quite possible to want to use two or more but nothing is really set up to handle that well.

It's an interesting one because anyone developing a software-only product has the opposite incentive - putting as much on the cloud as possible reduces support costs - no more "it says it's compatible with Windows, but doesn't run on my 20-year old laptop!" or having to field support requests from ancient versions. Plus it provides cover for charging users monthly, and there's a good chance your hosting costs are less than the cost of supporting a locally installed version.

The more complex your software is, the more true this is - self-hosted enterprise software is not only more work to setup (ergo, more support tickets) but installed on a vast array of configurations (e.g., bare-metal K8s, OpenShift, GKE, Docker Swarm, EC2, ECS, etc, etc), only a portion of which are economical to test against and which will generate a steady stream of unique issues. Having an "enterprise-ready" SaaS product is expensive, sure, but probably less expensive than supporting hundreds or thousands of customers setting up their own unique version of your product.

On the other side, it's not possible to move hardware to the cloud so the core support costs don't - can't - go away. Adding cloud in that case is adding ongoing hosting costs and support costs and is at best reducing the volume of support requests, but adding "Cloud" won't eliminate whole classes of customer support like it could with a software-only product.

No, he's specifically referencing the initial setup step of Let's Encrypt, where you don't have a valid HTTPS cert so Let's Encrypt has to connect to your server over HTTP, see here: https://letsencrypt.org/docs/challenge-types/

And yes, technically he's not wrong. Well, technically he is wrong, in that it wouldn't be a MITM attack, exactly, but if an attacker can intercept requests sent to your domain by LE and respond however they want, they can generate an LE cert for your domain, even if you're not using Let's Encrypt. That said, they can't intercept generation of the LE certificate - the HTTP request is just to prove that you've got enough control over the domain to justify issuing one.

Using HTTPS wouldn't prevent that. I'm actually not sure how you would prevent that, short of removing HTTP-01 from the spec and requiring DNSSEC and so on. EDIT: I see a sibling comment pointed out that Let's Encrypt are aware of this, and are using "multi-perspective validation" to make requests from multiple regions, making this attack much harder to pull off (but never impossible, I suspect): https://letsencrypt.org/2020/02/19/multi-perspective-validat...

As far as legal obligations go, that's mostly going to depend on the country you're in, and how they're engaging you. If you're a full-time employee with an unlimited contract, ideally they'd employ you under their local legal entity. If they don't have one, they might use an "Employer of Record" service like Remote.com (never used them myself, and there are other companies that offer similar services).

If, however, you're a "contractor" but with an unlimited contract (or a contracted renewed repeatedly), and potentially a few other things that would give the impression you're an employee, then you might have some issues - I know that Germany will make your life miserable if you're determined to be engaging in "Scheinselbstständigkeit (or arbeitnehmerähnliche Selbstständiger)," or "Bogus self-employment (or quasi-employee self-employed)." The way around that is to file taxes as if you were employed and pay all the taxes that the company would ordinarily pay, which means that you need to account for that in your negotiations, plus the costs of a tax accountant if you're not comfortable doing that yourself. I don't know which country you're in, but it's something to look into.

If you're a genuine contractor who regularly switches companies (or at least multiple regular clients, depending on local law/etc) then I don't think there are any issues that would be specific to the US - you'd have to deal with things like VAT, currency conversion issues, possibly different tax years, etc, etc, but I'd also expect those to be common issues with any local contractor who works with clients in other countries.

Why would Nazis (or flat-earthers or QAnon or any other group likely to receive _substantial_ challenges to their world-view) stay somewhere where they'd be challenged, though? On a Reddit-like platform they'd downvote and/or ban to ensure it's almost entirely an echo-chamber, like every other part of Reddit.

If they somehow weren't able to control that, then I suspect they'd move to another platform organically, because why would they put up with a constant flow of opposing viewpoints that these groups believe, with absolute certainty, to be wrong?

I'd describe intrinsic rewards as "the thing, in and of itself, is enjoyable" and so if you're motivated primarily by intrinsic rewards, then doing anything that doesn't tickle that part of your brain tends to be somewhere between difficult and impossible and it's often the fear of punishment that finally forces you to do something. This is basically ADHD in a nutshell: can't do the thing because it's not fun, but oh crap the deadline is tomorrow so it must be done now because otherwise failure/get fired/etc.

So it's not so much about incentives or rewards, but that some people are motivated by things that aren't straightforward to control. Can you make unenjoyable tasks enjoyable? Maybe, if you understand that's the issue in the first place, and whatever it is that triggers that for you is something you can add to a task. e.g., a very common ADHD hack is doing something for other people - if you find it difficult to clean just for yourself, but you have guests coming over? Suddenly you're a cleaning machine; or perhaps you struggle to do boring, repetitive tasks in silence but add some music and off you go!

This is, incidentally, what makes being a manager actually challenging. People who are motivated by extrinsic rewards? Probably not super-difficult to motivate (raises, bonuses, public recognition, promotions, etc, are all tools for this). People who are motivated by intrinsic rewards? Well, that's a bit trickier, and I'm not sure what tools a manager would have available to them in this situation.

Yeah, doesn't really work for me either - even when I knew that I'd be much happier after completing the task (e.g., cleaning my room), but nope. I'd just sit there, staring at what I had to do, unable to do it. Then I started reading about ADHD and executive dysfunction and it started to explain a lot - at least for me, the task has to be relatively enjoyable in and of itself for me to do it. The prospect of a reward afterwards doesn't change that and doesn't motivate me to do it. Now I take medication and it's made a noticeable difference to how difficult it is to do unenjoyable tasks.

Reminds me of a couple of married friends of mine. The wife played a classical musical instrument (e.g., not an electric guitar) and had her sights set on being a professional. While working towards that she did a lot of teaching/practising/etc, and her students would often say something along the lines of "I'm so envious of all this time you have to practice music! How are you able to do it?!" and her reply was always a bit of a let-down/reality check for them: "my husband works in tech."

Not quite independently wealthy, but I imagine there's a fair few artists out there in a similar position.

They're pretty big. I've got a fairly basic JavaFX app that's compiled with Graal, and it weighs in at 98MB, or 32MB when zipped.

Errr... What do you mean by "easily affordable"? A quick look on Amazon says that I'd be paying something like €18.80/TB, so buying 400TB would be €7,520 - far out of the range of the majority of hobbyists. Plus a 100GBE NIC would be another €800 or so, plus you'll need all the other ancillary things like a case and a processor and RAM and cabling and whatever the monthly cost to host it somewhere, unless your ISP gives you a 100Gbps connection (which I'm sure will be extortionately expensive if they do). End result is the hardware costs alone approaching €10,000 - significantly more if you want any sort of redundancy or backups (or are you planning to run the whole thing in RAID0 YOLO mode?), plus probably low-hundreds per month, not including the time investment needed to maintain it.

I was laid off recently, and my now-former employer initially disabled accounts immediately, then reversed their decision and reactivated them (all while I was asleep). The first I knew that something was a bit awry was when I opened my laptop in the morning and saw I'd been logged out from Slack and removed from the GitHub org. The HR meeting invite then made it very clear what was going on and I wasn't permanently locked out until after that, a few hours later.

It actually hasn't, which is really frustrating. It's not possible to watch F1 online via F1TV in Germany - you must watch it via Sky who have purchased the exclusive streaming rights up to 2024, which is €20/month or so (and means you only have the German commentators, AFAIK). At least Sky don't force you to pay for a cable (or satellite) package - it is possible to pay just for a basic sports streaming package.

Ahh, cool, that's great to hear!

Are you planning to deal with all the complexities that each market brings? For example, compare with one of the standard German property search websites: https://www.immobilienscout24.de/ and here are some things that I, personally, would or have used when searching for property that I don't immediately see on your site:

For apartments:

* Searching by floor (or below or above floor)

* Searching by presence/absence of elevator

For all property types:

* Searching by rented / unrented status (evicting tenants for your own use is hard)

* Searching by build phase, if you're interested in new-build properties

* Searching by build year (some people prefer Altbaus, some consider them the work of the devil)

* Searching by heating type (underfloor vs radiator)

* Searching by rooms, not bedrooms. In Germany, a 1-room flat is a Studio Apartment and doesn't have a bedroom.

* Display of and searching by fees when buying (typically this is searching for "no estate agent fee")

* Display of and searching by Warm & Cold rent when renting

* Ability to search by state & city (at a bare minimum, and note that state affects how much property tax has to be paid when purchasing)

I think most countries are going to have a lot of little quirks like this, and it's going to be a hard sell to get people to switch over until you've got a lot of these in place for each country. I know that I've used international sites like this in the past and ultimately abandoned them because they either made it too difficult to find what I wanted, or there just weren't enough properties on there.

I think a lot of HN readers would find Foundry VTT to be a good choice - one-off fee, self-hostable, very, very extensible.

I think it's worth pointing out that VTTs (Foundry, Roll20, Fantasy Grounds, etc) don't tend to be good at actual map-making, since the program design and the target users are pretty different, and you're better off with other tools for that. Some of them export into a format that's easily importable into your VTT of choice, complete with walls and such, which helps getting started.

In Germany, 5 - 20 years seems to be pretty common. I haven't seen 30 years, but I wouldn't say it was impossible.

> I remember they found the car first. Would staying by the car not have bought them enough time?

Considering they went missing in June/July, and the car wasn't found until October, I think that's unlikely.

As a general rule, absolutely, but in this case it wouldn't have been enough on its own.

> there was a fairly long gap between the death of PDAs and the birth of smartphones.

Only if you define the birth of smartphones as starting with Android/iPhone. Palm released their own smartphones using the same OS as their PDAs (the Treo line) prior to that, and Microsoft had Windows Mobile plus a bundle of third-party manufacturers. Plus Blackberry had been around the whole time, too.

Looking it up, it seems that Palm Tungsten TX[1] was produced in 2005, 1.5-2 years after they started producing the Treo 600[2], which was one of the first smartphones - yes, it was inferior to the iPhone in a number of ways, but having owned a Treo 680, in my mind it still qualifies as a smartphone.

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

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treo_600

In addition to what everyone else has said, that would presumably prevent you from writing statements like "a++" or "a += 1" - instead you'd have to write "a = (a + 1) as u8", which seems like it would get very tedious, even if it is much clearer that it could overflow.

It's legal in some of the EU - to the best of my knowledge, it's illegal in Germany to have apps tell you about speed cameras/etc (you can have the app, you just can't use that bit of it).

Well, 10, 11, or 12 hour difference, depending on time of year. Having been on the other side of that (in NZ, dealing with UK people, so 11-13 hour difference), 8PM isn't really tolerable - that's two-three hours past normal finishing time, so you either nip out for dinner before the meeting, or you're eating super-late. Plus missing bedtime for kids, possibly having a longer commute home (public transport frequency falls off a cliff after peak hours), although maybe a much shorter commute if you drive.

It worked out for me because I worked 1PM to 11PM or so (my bosses weren't thrilled about it, but not a lot they could do), but I'd have been very unhappy if I was working a normal 8 - 5 or 9 - 6 day.

These days I live in Europe and won't work outside my standard hours, with very rare exceptions, backed up by some fairly strong laws (Germany, so not as strong as France, I think) and some interesting wording choices in my contract.

GraalVM is really more like a very specialised JVM that can be used to spit out a native binary for any platform for which there exists a GraalVM version.

But in order to do that, it does some interesting things under the hood, and it doesn't play nicely with reflection by default (amongst other things). For some non-Java JVM languages that's a major problem since their compiler produces JVM byte code that relies heavily on reflection (Groovy is/was a great example of this). I'm unsure how much, if any, reflection Clojure relies on but that would be the most likely reason for it to struggle with GraalVM compatibility.

It does work with GraalVM (although the last time I did anything with that, I went through Gluon, which provides a bunch of wrappers around it). I have no idea if Clojure works with GraalVM, but if it does I guess the only missing piece is doing all the work the Graal & Gluon Maven/Gradle plugins do in cljfx? Plus the multi-minute build cycle which requires several GB of RAM, but that's a whole different kettle of fish.