Yeah, sorry, was just referring to the browser. I use it and I find it okay.

And the web app is not good enough?

So who should go? You?

Or to catch if you start in a different OS and make changes to files that are then not tracked.

Would you say that it reads better as “not x” or “x not” (if we remove all special characters)?

I am kinda hearing what you are saying, but it also sounds quite depressing.

It is likely you are a bot, and then you get one it these regular captchas and the that will increase your score if you succeed.*

Look at me, I have free toilet paper at work.

It somehow disappears when I close my private browser.

Let me take a stab at it:

Problem: Given two list of length n, find what elements the two list have in common. (we assume that there are not duplicates within a single list)

Naive solution: For each element in the first list, check if it appears in the second.

Bogo solution: For each permutation of the first list and for each permutation of the second list, check if the first item in each list is the same. If so, report in the output (and make sure to only report it once).

Sorry, we sold out of that 5 min before you walked in.

Well, I guess PDF has one thing going for it (which might not be relevant for scientific papers): The same file will render the same on any platform (assuming the reader implements all the PDF spec to the tee).

Stuxnet would like a chat with you

I hear ya. But to be honest, what they are doing here is fine, and doesn’t seem malicious. There is an Open Document specification and they stick to it, but the spec doesn’t enforce everything. For instance for the ordering of certain elements on the page, I bet you they store store those elements in memory in an efficient data structure where ordering doesn’t matter, so when writing out the memory to disk, the easiest for them to do is just write it out in what order it appears in their data structure.

But there are probably other cases where they are not so innocent.

I will join that therapy session. This is pretty much what we did, except LFS, since it was “a requirement” to also track what they layouting of the Excel file was like.

And even extracting and inserting the code was not stable. Excel will arbitrarily change the casing of “.path” to “.Path” for no reason and add and remove whitespace between functions as it see fit. It was such a pain. We also had a hard time handling unicode strings for instance containing a degree sign. And the list goes on.

Yeah, I made such a tool - and kept polishing edge cases until I gave up. So just wanted to warn everyone.

Let me tell you something. I cannot tell you what company, but I have been tasked with putting Excel files in git “because they are just zip archives with xml” and it is just a disaster. Everytime you save the document it will save certain parts of the xml code in arbitrary ways (like each image is in a list and the order of that list is random everytime), some metadata is re-written everytime like time of last modified and finally all the xml files are one single line. The git diffs are complete useless and noisy and just looking at the Excel file will cause git to consider it updated. So sure, you can use git to snapshot you Office documents… But just don’t.

Sounds like you should find a new product to use.

Can we at least see it?

To be fair, this is a classical strategi in startups called “wizard of Oz prototyping” - it is used to test if there is a market for something before the tech is ready. But the tech is supposed to be created soon after and actually work…