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mci

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Ask HN: What features do you miss in Google Docs for desktop?

Posted by mci on Saturday June 13, 2026 @01:40AM
from the ask-hn dept.

(I don't work at Google. I just hope some Googler reads our answers and submits feature requests based on them :-)I often write documents in Google Docs on my laptop. Every time I open a new document, I change the font from Arial to Lexend and set the size from 11 to 14 points. I wish Google Docs would just remember my favorite font.Sometimes I insert special characters into my documents. The...

( Read More... | 1 comment | 3 points | on HN )
Re:Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model on Saturday April 04, 2026 @03:22AM (#47636734)
The first and second principal components (joy-sadness and anger) explain only 41% of the variance. I wish the authors showed further principal components. Even principal components 1-4 would explain no more than 70% of the variance, which seems to contradict the popular theory that all human emotions are composed of 5 basic emotions: joy, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust, i.e. 4 dimensions.
Re:Latex-wc: word count and word frequency for LaTeX projects on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @01:37PM (#46889753) 

  detex "$@" | wc
  detex "$@" | tr -cs '[:alnum:]' '\n' | grep . | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn
Re:Board Games in Ancient Fiction: Egypt, Iran, Greece on Monday February 02, 2026 @07:10AM (#46855075)
Interesting. Apion's description of the pessoi game mentioned in the Odyssey: flicking pebbles toward the Penelope-pebble convinces me more than translating pessoi as draughts. The problem with Apion's description is:

- There were 108 suitors (we know this from the Odyssey 16.245-254 [1]).

- All that Homer told us is: They were gladdening their hearts at pessoi in front of the doors, sitting on the hides of oxen which they themselves had slain (the Odyssey 1.106-108 [2]).

- You can't have 108 sitting men play the same game of marbles.

IMHO, pessoi was a 1:1 game and it was not a board game.

[1] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Hom.+Od.+16.24...

[2] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Hom.+Od.+1.106...

Re:The Tonnetz on Saturday October 18, 2025 @03:30AM (#45625591)
A recent blog post on thatsmaths.com was about Tonenetz, a diagram of harmonic relationships of notes. Tonenetz means 'tone network' in German :-)
Re:Rupert's Property on Friday August 29, 2025 @07:35AM (#45062720)
He is also known from prince Rupert's drops.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Rupert%27s_drop

Re:An interactive guide to sensor fusion with quaternions on Friday August 15, 2025 @01:11PM (#44914909)
> a quaternion is a 4D representation of a rotation in 3D space

A unit quaternion represents a rotation in R³.

A quaternion represents the quotient of two vectors in R³. That's what Hamilton had in mind.

Re:Cracovians: The Twisted Twins of Matrices on Friday June 20, 2025 @02:08PM (#44330313)
I took the liberty to replace my awkward wording with your "the result in column i and row j is the sum of product of elements in column i of the left cracovian and column j of the right cracovian". Hope you don't mind. Thanks!
Re:Cracovians: The Twisted Twins of Matrices on Friday June 20, 2025 @02:01PM (#44330240)
Author here. There are no practical advantages, as far as I know. Not even faster multiplication on today's computers.
Re:Cracovians: The Twisted Twins of Matrices on Friday June 20, 2025 @01:52PM (#44330152)
Thanks for the feedback, everyone. I pasted my Polish text into Gemini to translate it into English. Gemini hallucinated the translation of this example. Now it should be OK.
Re:Virality in cartography: What makes a map go viral? on Friday November 15, 2024 @01:22PM (#42149477)
My map of the most frequent occupational surnames in Europe [1] also went viral in 2015. When I posted it on Reddit, newspapers from Ireland (they asked me for permission to reprint it) to Greece (nobody else asked) and countless people on Facebook republished it. Well, everybody has a surname, an occupation, and a country.

Late advice: when making a viral image, put your URL on it :-)

[1] https://marcinciura.wordpress.com/2015/09/17/smiths-millers-...

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