Hacker News Reader

medgnoon Modifications to Google Chromium for removing Google integration

On an iPhone 8+ with iOS 12.0, I got 93.

I'm only posting because the plural of anecdote is data.

medgnoon Java is still available at zero-cost

I've never seen it either and found it to be immediately clear. I wonder what similar prefixes could be used for "libre not gratis" and "libre and gratis". I know that "Free" could stand in for the second, but it's more ambiguous than "$free" was in this article.

medgnoon How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters

Systems have a way of finding fall-back fonts. At least on OS X (err, macOS) they will satisfy glyph requests in order from the font you specify, some built-in fonts, and then any fonts that have the required glyphs. Finally, a "last resort" font is used to fill in any remaining glyphs[1].

A result of this is that if you ask for a character such as "𓀴" (U+13034 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH A044) in a monospace font, the symbol you get back can be variable width.

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

medgnoon Git client vulnerability announced

Then you run into problems with how characters are represented. For instance, é (lowercase latin e with an acute accent) can be represented either by one unicode codepoint (U+00E9, 'LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE'), or by two unicode codepoints (U+0065 U+0301 -- LATIN SMALL LETTER E, COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT). There are normalization forms that will convert these two representations into the same representation for easier comparison.

If you don't perform canonical equivalence checking, you could search for "café" and not find a file named "café.txt" if it uses the other representation.

medgnoon Apple decides Notification Center buttons are now off limits

Funny, I haven't heard anything about Evernote being asked to remove their widget buttons.[1]

I wonder if this is a case of the Today view being so new that there's not agreement between the App Store overlords on what's acceptable.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/a5udgxi.png

medgnoon Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)

Or use a text editor that supports region editing. I agree with you, but this isn't a complete failing of that syntax.

medgnoon New optimizations for X86 in upcoming GCC 5.0

I'm so glad to see auto-vectorization happening more and more often. However, I wonder whether a language that had built-in support for primitive floating-point vector types (e.g., GLSL's vec3, vec4, mat3, mat4) could help the compiler with performing these sorts of optimizations.