I feel like I’ve seen half a dozen HN submissions about this 900 WPM speed reading "barrier", and I’ll say it again: color me unconvinced until a proper study is done that measures people’s WPM alongside both their short-term and long-term recall.
Anecdotally, my ability to remember what I’ve read seems directly proportional to how much time I spend quietly reflecting on each section of a paper.
Speed reading seems more like a parlour trick than anything else.
Second the recommendation for "Moonwalking with Einstein." Ed Cooke (the memory coach and world memory champion featured prominently in the book) is also a really nice chap.
If you have any interest in memorization or mnemonics, it's a great read.
> If you have any interest in memorization or mnemonics, it's a great read.
Absolutely. Even if you don't have an interest in the subject, it's worth a read. I honestly picked that book up out of random; I had no idea such a world of memory existed. Brilliant book.
Totally agree. If you like this style of memoir + deep subject dive, I also highly recommend anything by A.J. Jacobs - his "Year of Living Biblically", and "The Know-It-All" are great reads in the same vein.
I spend a great deal of time reading on an e-ink tablet, and solved this problem years ago by buying a Levo tablet floor stand on wheels (5-axis, adjustable height). It’s heavy enough to be very stable, and I just roll it over to the couch or bed whenever I want to settle in for a long reading session. Works perfectly.
Due to pdf popularity there is a lot of demand for pdf processing tools. And the format is so complex that there are many nontrivial and creative ways to do pdf processing. That's why these "Hello World" projects usually make Top 5 on HN, and one of the upvotes is usually from me.
Moreover, I see a webapp and I immediately assume everything I do in this app is exfiltrated and abused.
I can check that the webapp advertised above is indeed local-first, but I can't be 100% sure they don't steal my data in a way I did not foresee, e.g. via websockets or cookies.
Because I learnt this the hard way by being on Instagram and Gmail.
Your commands to process PDF with Ghostscript are lossy (they lose lots of metadata and in minor ways they also change how the PDF renders), and they produce very large PDF files.
You're being downvoted because not everyone has CLI access to a server and the required ghostscript binaries etc.
Realistically, most 'normal users' have PDF needs like these links and we as tech people can safely give these sites to non-technical people and have confidence their data isn't being stolen on remote dodgy servers (think gas / electricity bills, invoices, bank statements etc which is a PII gold pot).
Server? what server? Ghostscript is available in virtually any Linux distro, on Mac with and without brew and even on Windows.
I have no confidence in any website, especially the one that claims to be local-only but can technically change on a whim of the developer once it starts getting enough traffic from users.
OTOH, I trust 30+ years old software sitting on on my hard drive not to phone home on every keystroke.
During my college days, I used iLovePDF a lot, so I wanted to build an alternative to it. It’s not just about PDFs - I also have work in progress around image processing and related tools and Chrome Extetion as well
Sure, but if you just wanted a 100% client-side PDF tool, there are dozens of them in existence already.
You can do as you like, but I don't think this is a particularly good use of your time, even with AI doing the majority of the heavy lifting.
I guess what I'm saying is that "Swiss army knife multitool" apps are one of the lowest hanging LLM fruits, so don't be too surprised when you find that the tree has been stripped clean.
You're right, the market is flooded with simple "button grid" apps. That saturation is actually why I built FlowPDF.
I didn't want another list of basic tools; I wanted to chain them. I built a node-based editor so you can create actual pipelines (Merge -> OCR -> Filter -> Compress) rather than just doing one-off tasks.
I think that's the only way to actually add value over the 50 other "Hello World" clones.
Sure, if they're tested well enough that there are no obvious UX issues (which is usually not the case)
It's just that there's zero effort put into them so they don't really offer anything of value. If you write a todo list-tier app, it would be completely useless to most people, but it's a learning project for you. If you vibecoded a todo list-tier app, it's completely useless to most people including yourself.
So if a platform is vibe-coded, it suddenly has no value? When the Spotify founder vibe-codes an app, it’s praised—but when an open-source contributor like me does it, it’s seen as a bad thing? That doesn’t seem fair
I don’t have a role model, bro, and I don’t need to justify anything to you. You’re not that important-so yeah, go ahead and make some contribution to the world, not here
Yuzo Koshiro, perhaps the most famous composer behind the SOR music, is also apparently contributing some tracks to Mina the Hollower (from the same folks who made Shovel Knight), which I’m very much looking forward to.
My favorite piece from him will always be Fillmore from Actraiser - it hits hard 40 seconds into it.
Yeah at least for 2D, Opus 4.5 seems decent. It can struggle with finer details, so sometimes I’ll grab a highlighter tool in Photoshop and mark the points of interest.
And it’s (Claude) almost certainly accumulated a fair amount of knowledge about the game itself, given the number of tutorials, guides, and other resources that have been written about DF over the last two decades.
Anecdotally, my ability to remember what I’ve read seems directly proportional to how much time I spend quietly reflecting on each section of a paper.
Speed reading seems more like a parlour trick than anything else.
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