frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

https://openciv3.org/
576•klaussilveira•10h ago•167 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
889•xnx•16h ago•540 comments

How we made geo joins 400× faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
91•matheusalmeida•1d ago•20 comments

What Is Ruliology?

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/01/what-is-ruliology/
18•helloplanets•4d ago•9 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
21•videotopia•3d ago•0 comments

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
197•isitcontent•11h ago•24 comments

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
199•dmpetrov•11h ago•91 comments

Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

https://vecti.com
307•vecti•13h ago•136 comments

Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

https://github.com/microsoft/litebox
352•aktau•17h ago•175 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
350•ostacke•17h ago•91 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
452•todsacerdoti•18h ago•228 comments

Delimited Continuations vs. Lwt for Threads

https://mirageos.org/blog/delimcc-vs-lwt
20•romes•4d ago•2 comments

Dark Alley Mathematics

https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/three-points/
79•quibono•4d ago•18 comments

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/09/pc-floppy-copy-protection-vault-prolok.html
52•kmm•4d ago•3 comments

Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
253•eljojo•13h ago•153 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
388•lstoll•17h ago•263 comments

Was Benoit Mandelbrot a hedgehog or a fox?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01122
5•bikenaga•3d ago•1 comments

How to effectively write quality code with AI

https://heidenstedt.org/posts/2026/how-to-effectively-write-quality-code-with-ai/
230•i5heu•13h ago•175 comments

Zlob.h 100% POSIX and glibc compatible globbing lib that is faste and better

https://github.com/dmtrKovalenko/zlob
12•neogoose•3h ago•7 comments

Show HN: R3forth, a ColorForth-inspired language with a tiny VM

https://github.com/phreda4/r3
68•phreda4•10h ago•12 comments

Female Asian Elephant Calf Born at the Smithsonian National Zoo

https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/female-asian-elephant-calf-born-smithsonians-national-zoo-an...
24•gmays•6h ago•6 comments

Why I Joined OpenAI

https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2026-02-07/why-i-joined-openai.html
116•SerCe•7h ago•94 comments

I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

https://infisical.com/blog/devops-to-solutions-engineering
135•vmatsiiako•16h ago•59 comments

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

https://visualrambling.space/neural-network/
268•surprisetalk•3d ago•36 comments

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

https://developers.googleblog.com/introducing-the-developer-knowledge-api-and-mcp-server/
42•gfortaine•8h ago•13 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
168•limoce•3d ago•87 comments

I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

https://kirkville.com/i-now-assume-that-all-ads-on-apple-news-are-scams/
1039•cdrnsf•20h ago•431 comments

FORTH? Really!?

https://rescrv.net/w/2026/02/06/associative
60•rescrv•18h ago•22 comments

Show HN: ARM64 Android Dev Kit

https://github.com/denuoweb/ARM64-ADK
14•denuoweb•1d ago•2 comments

Show HN: Smooth CLI – Token-efficient browser for AI agents

https://docs.smooth.sh/cli/overview
88•antves•1d ago•63 comments
Open in hackernews

How to create accessible PDFs from the start

https://typst.app/blog/2025/accessible-pdf/
106•leephillips•3mo ago

Comments

ozim•2mo ago
Have to say I really liked reading the article on mobile.

I have smaller phone even but layout was good an spacing was great.

Black text on white background not some grayish to look different but perfectly legible.

elric•2mo ago
> It will be read in the wrong order

I really dislike it when this happens. This also affects copy/pasting. This typically seems to happen with LaTeX-style two-column layouts, where columns are supposed to be read top to bottom, left to right, but tools end up reading paragraphs from left to right, top to bottom. It's infuriating.

PDFs suck. And it's awful that they're the least bad option for a lot of things.

dvh•2mo ago
I've noticed a very lagy performance when reading specifically Texas instrument datasheets, I scroll 2 pages and bam 5s lag, then it usually works or lags occasionally. I passed the PDF through some gpt-concocted ghostscript woodoo and then they work just fine:

    gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 \
       -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH \
       -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf
mmooss•2mo ago
How does that script change the PDF? Does -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook do something? Is simply rewriting it in ghostscript making a difference?
dvh•2mo ago
I think the 1.4 does the most.
jiehong•2mo ago
TIL: PDF/UA is a thing!

While reading the article I could only think that all this semantic stuff is what html is about!

So, I think it makes more sense to do what arxiv is doing: providing a html version of articles on top of pdfs. I’d even say html should be the source and the PDF should be generated from it instead.

robin_reala•2mo ago
You won’t be able to generate semantic HTML from inaccessible PDF, that needs to be there from day one.
chanux•2mo ago
I wonder if some of these accessibility features help LLMs (Given the programs that process PDFs to feed LLMs account for those.)
lblume•2mo ago
Sure. But it also helps humans, and I'd guess currently more so.
chanux•2mo ago
Did my comment come in a negative tone?

It was more of a genuine question, if it can be useful for machines while not being "visible". This thinking is a slippery slope though, because it can be stretched to a point where it defeats the original purpose.

ethin•2mo ago
IMO PDFs should just be gone. Nobody should use them. They are a solution in search of a problem. The most common argument I hear is "well we need document fidelity!" But IMO this completely ignores the fact that this just isn't needed when we have digital signatures and a PKI and certificates and all that to prove that a document hasn't been tampered with. Making sure a document appears the same on any kind of device/OS or whatever would be a great idea in theory if the way it was done was actually thought through, but it wasn't and now the PDF format is even worse than HTML is (and that's really saying something). Every single time I have had to interact with a PDF it has always been a total disaster. Don't even get me started on the clusterfuck that is PDF forms.
ozim•2mo ago
PDF is fine as output format and for archiving.

Thing is people want to do bunch of things they shouldn’t with PDF like automated parsing, editing or adding forms to it.

Ideally you should have an API or other structured data to pass around but of course life is more complicated. Like PDF is all you get because API would cost more than it makes sense to do bad job parsing PDF.

wongarsu•2mo ago
The problem was "have documents that look the same on any device, including printed paper and computer screens", and the approach was "PostScript does that for printers, let's simplify it and make it more universal". Both the problem it's solving and the approach were fine, maybe even great. Since then over three decades have passed, pdf has gained a plethora of features, some less well thought out than others, and real-world requirements are completely different than they were in the early 90s. If we were to invent pdf today it would likely look completely different. But it's still good enough that it's hard for a new format to offer an advantage compelling enough to replace pdf.
ethin•2mo ago
Right, but that's what I'm getting at: PDF is just a terrible format all round. People do things with it that have nothing to do with document preservation. We have PDF forms, we have PDFs able to execute arbitrary JS (which can modify the rendering of the document, completely defeating the entire reason for the format existing)... Like IMO the format just has no reason to exist/be used anymore given how bloated and over-complicated it is.
ericpauley•2mo ago
That's why we have PDF/A: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A
DHRicoF•2mo ago
Heck. I need any replacment to be at least equally capable of PDFs. The minimum I expect is for it to be able to run Linux in them.

https://github.com/ading2210/linuxpdf

/s

mmooss•2mo ago
> Every single time I have had to interact with a PDF it has always been a total disaster.

This is obviously absurd, and we don't know what you really mean. Probably billions of people use PDFs; I expect hundreds of millions use them regularly. I use them all the time, no problem, they work great.

PDFs are also a rare format which is preserved and functions reliably over time (decades) over systems (just about anything you can name). If I have a document I want to read 10-20 or more years in the future, PDF is the best bet.

The far superior presentation of professionally prepared PDFs - layout, typography, formatting, etc - makes a large difference for me when reading long texts. Also, the markup works very well and is also preserved - I can read markup from entirely different systems going back decades, and the annotation I make today I can read in 2050.

miki123211•2mo ago
Typst doesn't (yet) do math accessibility I think, and Math is a lot of what it is about.

Wondering why they omitted that information from a blog post promoting Typst for accessibility use cases...

thangalin•2mo ago

    #show strong: set text(fill: blue)

    Join us for a David Lynch double
    feature with *Mulholland Drive* and
    *Inland Empire* next Tuesday
    at 8:15 PM.
I didn't realize Typst mixes content and presentation. Presumably, Typst allows including styles from external sources, much like the HTML/CSS split?

ConTeXt has also been making strides in creating accessible PDF files:

* https://meeting.contextgarden.net/2024/talks/hans+mikael/con...

* https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Input_and_compilation/Accessi...

klauserc•2mo ago
Isn't that example the exact opposite of mixing content and presentation? The * notation applies the strong [emphasis] tag, the show rule (re-)defines the presentation. Ideally you would of course separate the two into separate files (template + content).

In my time using Typst, I found that Typst makes it possible/easy to make content even more abstract: write the content as a "data structure" and then present parts of it in various places around your document. For instance to list quantity/weight of a parts description in a parts index at the end.

thangalin•2mo ago
> Ideally you would of course separate the two into separate files (template + content).

Exactly: If instructions for how to style the content are in the same file as the content, then that is mixing content _with_ presentation logic. Avoiding this approach to documentation is what I alluded to in writing, "Presumably, Typst allows including styles from external sources."