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Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes"

https://shreevatsa.net/post/douglas-adams-cultural-divide/
128•speckx•1h ago•81 comments

Design Thinking Books You Must Read

https://www.designorate.com/design-thinking-books/
120•rrm1977•3h ago•52 comments

We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

https://curl.se/.well-known/security.txt
548•latexr•4h ago•316 comments

Show HN: Sweep, Open-weights 1.5B model for next-edit autocomplete

https://huggingface.co/sweepai/sweep-next-edit-1.5B
427•williamzeng0•15h ago•79 comments

ISO PDF spec is getting Brotli – ~20 % smaller documents with no quality loss

https://pdfa.org/want-to-make-your-pdfs-20-smaller-for-free/
43•whizzx•4h ago•19 comments

Doctors in Brazil using tilapia fish skin to treat burn victims

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/brazilian-city-uses-tilapia-fish-skin-treat-burn-victims
172•kaycebasques•9h ago•61 comments

In Praise of APL (1977)

https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/perlis77.htm
60•tosh•6h ago•35 comments

30 Years of ReactOS

https://reactos.org/blogs/30yrs-of-ros/
74•Mark_Jansen•6h ago•25 comments

Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/
379•misswaterfairy•16h ago•256 comments

You can now download Windows 7 and Vista ISO images with all the updates

https://www.neowin.net/news/you-can-now-download-windows-7-and-vista-iso-images-with-every-possib...
25•XzetaU8•45m ago•10 comments

Threat actors expand abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code

https://www.jamf.com/blog/threat-actors-expand-abuse-of-visual-studio-code/
223•vinnyglennon•14h ago•202 comments

Flowtel (YC W25) Is Hiring

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flowtel/jobs/LaddaEz-founding-engineer-staff-senior
1•eylonmiz•2h ago

Palantir, Meta, OpenAI Execs Appointed Lieutenant Colonels in US Army

https://twitter.com/SecArmy/status/1933693585183965372
17•alexmorley•26m ago•3 comments

eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

https://www.valueaddedresource.net/ebay-bans-ai-agents-updates-arbitration-user-agreement-feb-2026/
209•bdcravens•17h ago•226 comments

Gathering Linux Syscall Numbers in a C Table

https://t-cadet.github.io/programming-wisdom/#2026-01-17-gathering-linux-syscall-numbers
72•phi-system•4d ago•28 comments

A Year of 3D Printing

https://brookehatton.com/blog/making/a-year-of-3d-printing/
43•nindalf•4d ago•37 comments

Hands-On Introduction to Unikernels

https://labs.iximiuz.com/tutorials/unikernels-intro-93976514
83•valyala•5d ago•29 comments

Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search
384•josephwegner•21h ago•212 comments

Claude's new constitution

https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-new-constitution
494•meetpateltech•22h ago•568 comments

Show HN: ChartGPU – WebGPU-powered charting library (1M points at 60fps)

https://github.com/ChartGPU/ChartGPU
629•huntergemmer•1d ago•194 comments

Skip is now free and open source

https://skip.dev/blog/skip-is-free/
456•dayanruben•23h ago•205 comments

The Science of Life and Death in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-science-of-life-and-death-in-mary-shelleys-frankenstein/
5•Anon84•4d ago•0 comments

The Human in the Loop

https://adventures.nodeland.dev/archive/the-human-in-the-loop/
22•artur-gawlik•3d ago•17 comments

Meet the Alaska Student Arrested for Eating an AI Art Exhibit

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/alaska-student-arrested-eating-ai-art-exhibit/
8•petethomas•47m ago•2 comments

Binary fuse filters: Fast and smaller than xor filters (2022)

https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.01174
118•redbell•5d ago•10 comments

Lix – universal version control system for binary files

https://lix.dev/blog/introducing-lix/
95•onecommit•15h ago•37 comments

From stealth blackout to whitelisting: Inside the Iranian shutdown

https://www.kentik.com/blog/from-stealth-blackout-to-whitelisting-inside-the-iranian-shutdown/
140•oavioklein•14h ago•104 comments

Now with Mqtts

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/01/19/now-with-mqtts/
13•firesteelrain•1h ago•1 comments

TrustTunnel: AdGuard VPN protocol goes open-source

https://adguard-vpn.com/en/blog/adguard-vpn-protocol-goes-open-source-meet-trusttunnel.html
170•kumrayu•21h ago•58 comments

Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

https://www.fb.org/market-intel/significant-farm-losses-persist-despite-federal-assistance
232•toomuchtodo•13h ago•300 comments
Open in hackernews

ISO PDF spec is getting Brotli – ~20 % smaller documents with no quality loss

https://pdfa.org/want-to-make-your-pdfs-20-smaller-for-free/
43•whizzx•4h ago

Comments

delfinom•1h ago
tl;dr Commerical entity is paying to have the ISO altered to "legalize" their SDK they are pushing which is incompatible with standard PDF readers.

ISO is pay to play so :shrug:

bhouston•1h ago
I'm no fan of Adobe, but it is not that hard to add brotli support given that it is open. Probably can be added by AI without much difficulty - it is a simple feature. I think compared to the ton of other complex features PDF has, this is an easy one.
lmz•1h ago
It's not even clear that they were the ones suggesting inclusion. They're just saying their library now supports the new thing.

https://pdfa.org/brotli-compression-coming-to-pdf/

> As of March 2025, the current development version of MuPDF now supports reading PDF files with Brotli compression. The source is available from github.com/ArtifexSoftware/mupdf, and will be included as an experimental feature in the upcoming 1.26.0 release.

> Similarly, the latest development version of Ghostscript can now read PDF files with Brotli compression. File creation functionality is underway. The next official Ghostscript release is scheduled for August this year, but the source is available now from github.com/ArtifexSoftware/Ghostpdl.

whizzx•17m ago
No this feature is coming straight from the PDF association itself and we just added experimental support before it's officially in the spec to help testing between different sdk processors.

So your comment is a falsehood

bhouston•1h ago
Are they using a custom dictionary with Brotli designed for PDFs? I am not sure if it would help or not, but it seems like one of those cases it may help?

Something like this:

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/shared-dictionary-compress...

In my applications, in the area of 3D, I've been moving away from Brotli because it is just so slow for large files. I prefer zstd, because it is like 10x faster for both compression and decompression.

whizzx•10m ago
The pdf association is still running experiments on whether or not to support custom dictionaries based on real life workloads gains.

So it might land in the spec once it has proven if offers enough value

bobpaw•59m ago
How can iText claim that adding Brotli is not a backward incompatible change (in the "Why keep encoding separate" table)? In the first section the author states that any new feature must work seamlessly with existing readers. New documents created that include this compression would be unintelligible to any reader that only supports Deflate.

Am I missing something? Adoption will take a long time if you can't be confident the receiver of a document or viewers of a publication will be able to open the file.

whizzx•21m ago
Because I'm doing the work to patch in support across different viewers to help adoption grow. And once the big opensource ones ship it pdfjs, poppler, pdfium, adoption can quickly rise.
ericpauley•57m ago
Some real cognitive dissonance in this article…

“The PDF Association operates under a strict principle—any new feature must work seamlessly with existing readers” followed by introducing compression as a breaking change in the same paragraph.

All this for brotli… on a read-many format like pdf zstd’s decompression speed is a much better fit.

xxs•37m ago
yup, zstd is better. Overall use zstd for pretty much anything that can benefit from a general purpose compression. It's a beyond excellent library, tool, and an algorithm (set of).

Brotli w/o a custom dictionary is a weird choice to begin with.

greenavocado•20m ago
This bizzare move has all the hallmarks of embrace-extend-extinguish rather than technical excellence
adzm•15m ago
Brotli makes a bit of sense considering this is a static asset; it compresses somewhat more than zstd. This is why brotli is pretty ubiquitous for precompressed static assets on the Web.

That said, I personally prefer zstd as well, it's been a great general use lib.

ksec•41m ago
Why not zstd?
PunchyHamster•20m ago
incompetence
whizzx•12m ago
You can read about it here https://pdfa.org/brotli-compression-coming-to-pdf/
jeffbee•6m ago
That mentions zstd in a weird incomplete sentence, but never compares it.
cess11•35m ago
'Your PDF:s will open slower because we decided that the CDN providers are more important than you'.

If size was important to users then it wouldn't be so common that systems providers crap out huge PDF files consisting mainly of layout junk 'sophistication' with rounded borders and whatnot.

The PDF/A stuff I've built stays under 1 MB for hundreds of pages of information, because it's text placed in a typographically sensible manner.

h4x0rr•22m ago
Wouldn't lzma2 be better here since a pdf is more read heavy?
F3nd0•16m ago
Going by one of Brotli’s authors’ comment [1] on another post, it probably wouldn’t.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46035817