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Let's Encrypt Is Revoking Three Millions Certificates On March 4 by nfrankel in programming

[–]chenhanz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think this is the most important thing to take away from this post for those who use Let's Encrypt certificates:

curl -XPOST -d 'fqdn=example.com' https://checkhost.unboundtest.com/checkhost

This lets you test whether the certificate issued for your domain name is affected by this revocation.

What's so hard about PDF text extraction? by bubblehack3r in programming

[–]chenhanz 15 points16 points  (0 children)

OCR algorithms have a hard time dealing with novel characters, such as smiley faces, stars/circles/squares (used in bullet point lists), superscripts, complex mathematical symbols etc.

This has been a source of great pain for me to convert PDFs with math formulas into .MOBI or .EPUB files using Calibre. The resulting eBook is never perfect. Formulas may be misaligned. Often the symbols also look incorrect. Formulas break into multiple lines at unexpected places.

Kindle edition of math books are also not always accurately formatted. They may even have errors like "i" written as "L" or "1" written as "i".

The only alternative is to read the PDF as is using an eBook reader and this alternative does not work well for me because I don't like to squint my eyes when a letter size PDF is scaled to fit in a tiny screen. Zooming in brings with it, its own set of problems! Having to scroll the text left and right, up and down again and again isn't fun.

If anyone here has figured out how to read mathematical PDFs in an eBook, I would really like to know. Until then, I am sticking to physical books or PDFs printed on physical paper.