Re: WebP: The WebPage Compression Format

the longest post on my site, takes 92 KiB instead of 37 KiB. This amounts to an unnecessary 2.5x increase in load time

Sure, if you ignore latency. In reality it's an unnecessary 0.001% increase in load time because that size increase isn't enough to matter vs the round trip time. And the time you save transmitting 55 fewer KiB is probably less than the time lost to decompression. :p

While fun, I would expect this specific scenario to actually be worse for the user experience not better. Speed will be a complete wash and compatibility will be worse.

BugsJustFindMe, 1 day ago

Re: Appalachian Trail Hiker Photo Archive

Wow. Thank you for posting this. I am fifty years old. In 1989 my best friend, Geof Allen, and I spent an entire year planning to walk the AT after high school. During long nights in my parents basement we literally mapped out every step by figuring out how many steps were in a mile, and then multiplying. Life happened. He walked the entire AT from Spring Mtn to Mt Kahdin. I reluctantly followed my parents wishes and went off to college.

Even in high school Geof was unlike anyone I ever knew. He did not have the best life, but he always smiled. When we were winter-camping together Geof knew how to make your frozen feet not-so-bad. When we were lost deep in a cave in Newport, Virginia, Geof showed no signs of worry, while I openly panicked.

After walking the AT Geof joined the Navy, and when a slot opened up he became a Blue Angel...not a pilot, but still a prestigious position with a flight suit as a uniform. He married his high school sweetheart, and after the Navy, moved back home and became a police officer.

I had totally lost contact with Geof, and was working in IT across the street from my local police department. As I was walking to my car one afternoon I saw Geof standing in the parking lot. We chatted and caught up a bit, and then lost contact again.

The next time I heard Geof's name was years later. He had committed suicide. I almost want to say that he didn't have a choice. You see, he had watched all of the other males and one female in his fathers bloodline be taken away by Huntington's Disease. I found out later that Geof was in the early-stages, and it was easy to deduce that he needed to take action while he was still able.

We were all from the same hometown. I knew his Uncles and his Aunt, and watched what Huntington's did to them, and I was there the day his father committed suicide.

I found Geof's picture on athikerpictures.com. He is second from the left. Blue pants and white shirt. I am certain that he made life easier for the three hikers pictured with him. His trail name was Alpha. Alpha Geof Allen.

waltwalther, 11 hours ago

Re: Dogs can remember names of toys years after not se...

I've had my Labrador for 12 years, she was about 1 when we rescued her.

In the first week I was walking her and passed a bus stop mainly used by school kids. There's a small wall behind it and she dashed around and emerged with half a sausage roll hanging out of her mouth.

To this day, every time we pass that spot she enthusiastically pulls and goes round to inspect.

petepete, 14 hours ago

Re: Honey, I shrunk {fmt}: bringing binary size to 14k...

All the formatting in {fmt} is locale-independent by default (which breaks with the C++’s tradition of having wrong defaults)

Chuckles

magnio, 15 hours ago

Re: Founder Mode

This whole article is written around one key sentence:

There are things founders can do that managers can't, and not doing them feels wrong to founders, because it is.

But there are absolutely no examples given of what these things actually are. Paul kinda vibes around that vague statement for 5 more paragraphs, giving absolutely nothing concrete.And to be honest this hn comment section scares me, as it feels like people are discussing Paul’s new clothes without actually voicing out what they are talking about.

What the hell is “Founder mode”, exactly?

smugglerFlynn, 4 hours ago

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

A few reasons!

• More than anything, I think it's good for things to end! I figured interest in the site would die off over time (and it started to), and I thought it was better to close things out providing a special experience for the people that used it than to keep it up to get a few more users
• Costs started adding up; donations stopped matching them. I coulda figured out how to lower my costs but I wasn't excited about it.
• While the site was up I felt an obligation to make sure someone hadn't found some trivial workaround to deface the thing and I didn't want to do that anymore.

I'm very pro ephemeral stuff! So I feel good about the decision. But it's a good question.

eieio, 2 days ago

Re: Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of te...

A lot of really terrible takes in this comment section. Telegram didn't have encrypted groups by default, and telegram possessed a lot of content on their servers that they had been made aware was illegal and didn't cooperate. Nothing more, nothing less.

The comparisons to other providers is off base because either other providers are cooperating more when they possess actionable, unencrypted information and taking steps to detect or prevent such recurrences or they are like Signal and do not have access to the underlying material in the first place or store it for very long anyway.

One cannot legally run a hosted, unmoderated content platform in the developed world, one will always be required to remove illegal materials and turn over materials in cooperation with law enforcement.

devman0, 16 hours ago

Re: Police Chief Says Cops Have a 5th Amendment Right ...

In general, courts have held that Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination pertain to testimonial evidence, not broadly to any possible evidence that might be incriminating.

The Fifth Amendment does not extend to physical evidence or other non-testimonial evidence, even if such evidence is potentially incriminating. For example, courts have held that things like blood samples, fingerprints, handwriting samples, and even video or audio recordings do not fall under the protection of the Fifth Amendment because they are not considered testimonial in nature.

The report notes that it is the police chief, not a lawyer representing him, who is making the preposterous argument that the Fifth Amendment justifies his conduct. Any lawyer who tried to make that argument would be made a laughing stock.

Indeed, I would think that this internal affairs report, where the chief is essentially admitting that he knew he'd done something wrong and was trying to prevent incriminating evidence from being recorded, would be pretty damning in front of a jury, because it establishes that he was well aware of the recklessness of his conduct.

jawns, 4 hours ago

Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign C...

Gaia-X is a disaster. The article misrepresents it. Gaia-X is not a framework for what a European cloud should look like. This would be useful.

In beautiful EU bureaucratic style It's a framework for how to talk about how a European Cloud could look like.

It's not about technical standards. It's about how we can talk about how we can think of maybe eventually deciding on how we can come up with standards that might one day lead to talk about implementations.

It represents to me everything that is wrong with the EU today. A bureaucratic monster that can't decide how to talk about things or come to any form of alignment.

arianvanp, 3 hours ago

Re: Police Cannot Seize Property Indefinitely After an...

This is a well-intentioned but largely useless ruling because it fails to define the maximum duration for which property can be held. As such, it's up to the police as to what qualifies as indefinite. If the ruling had capped it to 14 or 30 days, that would be a useful ruling.

A hard time cap is essential because one's life too has a cap. The amount of time for which one can go without earning a livelihood also has a cap. Imagine if prison sentences didn't have a time cap.

This illustrates a common problem with our laws. They're very often vaguely defined, needlessly so, in a way that keeps attorneys and judges very rich, and the police abusive, to the detriment of the individual. In a sensible world, the laws would all be rewritten for clarity and consistency, starting with the Constitution.

OutOfHere, 10 hours ago