Or use Vim; it has built in support for zip files, so you can just type something like `vim my_file.docx` and it will open the files in netrw (the built in file explorer). Move to the file you want and hit enter. "word/document.xml" has the main document contents in it.
The xml will probably need to be run through a formatter to be readable. You can type `:%!xmllint --format -` if you have xmllint installed.
Now prepare to spend several hours trying to make sense of the xml. :-p
The first relates to the actual facts of the situation, whereas the second relates to your thoughts and feelings about it.
The range of answers in this thread should tell you that different people can have different reactions to the same events. This should give you the idea that your reactions could be changed.
After all "what one man can do, another can do"
The key to understanding anxiety is to realise that it involves thought-looping -- ruminating on the same negative ideas in an escalating spiral.
The answer to overcoming anxiety is to find a way to break out of the loop.
The actual thoughts themselves are not as interesting as you think they are. You are caught on your thoughts and feelings.
If you have the time, a great way to overcome anxiety is to do a sort of body-scan meditation.
Lie on the floor with a book under the back of your head for a little support, knees up or flat to the ground as you prefer.
Pick an area of your body that feels tense, stiff, painful or just uncomfortable. Focus your attention on the area for as long as possible.
The feelings there may start to change. If it starts to feel relaxed, move to the next most tense area.
The aim of the exercise is to focus your attention on the internal muscular sensations of your body, rather than your thoughts.
If you aren't used to relaxing, you may find that this increases your anxiety at first, but that is all part of the response.
If you can keep on returning your thoughts to whatever muscular sensations you are aware of, over and over for half an hour,
you will find yourself becoming much more relaxed. Once you are relaxed, you will find that anxiety doesn't really make sense anymore.
People don't just respnd anxiously to stressful events out of the blue. I bet this isn't the first time in your life you have found something overwhelming and it has taken over your mind.
Did you feel in control of your life before this started, or were you already on edge? Did you feel like you were succeeding, like all your relationships were going well?
These things tend to come in clusters. People who are happy and relaxed are not easily perturbed by events that don't immediately affect them.
The threat is real, and I wouldn't like to say what the probabilities of different outcomes are.
I'm worried, but then I know that a part of me just enjoys worrying a bit. I easily get anxious if I let myself, but I have learned to control it with the technique I outlined above.
The hackerweb.app site seems very good for accessibility. It uses nested lists as others here have suggested.
hn.premii.com is a little more difficult to use (in terms of getting from the list of posts to the comments), but still quite usable. It uses a slightly more complicated layout of divs and lists.
I'm on a PC and don't currently use a smartphone, but thanks for the suggestion and I will bear it in mind, and give you some feedback if I do use it. I'm sure others on hear could give you some feedback in the meantime.
Just to avoid any confusion, I'll preface this comment by saying that I'm not blind, but in the last few months have mostly been using a screenreader to avoid the migraines I was getting from even small amounts of screen use. So, in other words, I've used the site visually in the past and am now familiar enough with screenreaders and other sites to know waht an accessible site is like.
Basically, the comments on HackerNews are laid out in a tree form. When you first load the page, the comment tree is expanded. You can collapse them by pressing on the little '-' next to the comment.
With the tree expanded, NVDA just reads the comments as a linear stream. Of course, many forums are structured linearly, but the advantage of a tree layout is that you can have tangents like this one, without interrupting the main flow of the thread. Reddit is very similar in that regard. If NVDA can't read the tree structure, it's hard to know what is going on. From my experience, using the arrow keys ( e.g. CTRL + DownArrow ) will not report the indentation, whereas using the numpad keys ( e.g. Numpad 7 or Numpad 9 ) will report indentation, but will not indicate how deep the indentation is, so that isn't terribly helpful. It may be possible to change settings in NVDA to get this to work, but I doubt it, which leads us to the technical implementation.
As others have pointed out, the comments are in a complicated nested table structure, which NVDA seems completely blind to, not even recognizing it as a table. Then, the visual indentation is created by prepending the comments with gif images, which act as spacers. The width of the spacers is determined by a 'width=' attribute.
Others who are more knowledgeable than me have already pointed out alternative ways that this could be implemented, such as using <ol> or <ul> tags.
It wouldn't be hard to also criticize the lack of headings, but we can leave that for another day; if this indentation issue could be sorted out, the usability of the site would go up by about 300%. I've almost stopped coming on here since using a screnreader, whereas I used to browse on here a lot -- it's one of my favourite sites.
To the other commenters: thanks for the useful suggestions and insights; this had been bugging me for months.
Sorry for the tangent, but as a blind user, how do you manage to use HackerNews? I can't get a screenreader to pronounce indentation as the indentation of the comments is done with gif images as spacers. Do you know of a HackerNews app or alternative website that works better form an accessibility poinf-of-view? (I'm using NVDA on Windows).
These are all good points. I guess what I'm getting at is that if you have to have multiple identities to ensure privacy, then you somewhat defeat the point of having your own domain, unless that is, you have multiple domains that you own.
I don't particularly have anything to feel uneasy about. It's more the idea that I don't want one central domain that I use for everything which is tied to my real identity, either through the domain name itself or through the whois record (although I think you can pay to have an anonymous whois). It seems like a central point of failure. There are documented cases of people having their identity stolen and numerous online accounts hacked because they used the same email address to sign into various services. If you know someone's email address and one or two other things about them, social-engineering your way into other services they use seems to be relatively easy for a skilled attacker.
This is all somewhat paranoid thinking, but I don't want to go the hassle and expense of getting my own domain, only to that it is a less secure or private option.
I've been considering getting my own domain for email for some time -- the benefits are obvious. But I have one concern. If I use the address `[email protected]`, does this pose a privacy threat? If someone wants to try and track my activities online, they can take that address, which is clearly tied to me (especially if, say, I use that domain for a blog too), and then go to ashleymadison.com (does that still exist?) and try a password reset for that address; many sites poduce differing responses to password reset requests depending on whether or not you have an account there. If the response is "We've sent a password reset link to that address", rather than "There is no account with that address", then people now know I'm a philanderer.
I've even heard of people writing a bot to do this across hundreds of sites; it's very interesting to see which C-level executives have been using their work accounts to access sites they shouldn't have.
The obvious advantage of having a GMail or Outlook address is that only Google or Outlook have to know who you really are; the address could be anything you want and doesn't have to be related to your real name. In addition, you can do as I do and have multiple addresses -- not the "throwaways" which people often speak of, but simply different addresses for different online activities -- so that if an account ever got compromised, there would be no way to link it to any other account.
Email security and privacy is a hard problem to solve.
While I was in general agreement with the article, I think the examples are
extreme; the author has swung from wanting to learn every Java GUI framework
to reading books about softtware design. There is a middle ground, which is
what I was expecting the author to describe. Here is my (utterly incomplete
and non-comprehensive) list of books to read:
- The C Programming Language
- Computer Networking: Principles, Protocols and Practice
- The Art of Unix Programming
- An Introduction to Beginning Linux Programming
- Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 24 Hours
- The Python Data Science Handbook
- Python Programming with OpenCV
- Speaking Javascript
- Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS
Wade through that lot and you will have learned about C, UNIX/Linux, networking,
HTML CSS, Javascript, data science/machine learning, text processing, and
computer vision. I reckon that covers 90% of what gets posted on here.
While some of this seems quite specific, all of these books teach either
principles such as machine learning, or teach actual standards such as POSIX,
HTML etc. None of these are going out of fashion anytime soon, unlike the latest
GUI framework or virtual DOM library.
The last book in my list actually speaks to the broader issue of framework
use. The core takeaway of the book can be summarised as this: HTML is a tree
data structure, and clean CSS relies on namespacing CSS rules so that they
only apply to a specific branch of the tree, so no `.menu` classes or the
like, which will probably end up applying to all sorts of branches. I think
if every front-end dev understood this, libraries like React would have had
far less appeal, as everyone would have been too busy writing lean, fast HTMl
and CSS sites to have the time to learn how to make complicated React-powered
static blogs with loading spinners. (As an aside, I think there would have been
less of a backlash with motherfuckingwebsites and brutalist design, as only a
little CSS can make a site much more usable, with almost no impact on load time,
but I think people have been scared off it by bad experiences).
I've often thought of learning in terms of "learning trivia" vs. "understanding
concepts", but had never applied the word "trivia" to learning programming facts.
I'm a hobbyist, rather than a professional, so I learn what I want, while aiming
for comprehensive knowledge. Over time, I have become bored with learning frameworks
and libraries, and have become much more interested in learning standards.
The phrase I have ringing in my head is "don't learn APIs", which is rather
like your "don't learn trivia", but I think "trivia" captures the essence of it
better. To be a little more nuanced about it, I think the thing to avoid is learning
APIs for things that are not either standards, or defacto standards of long-standing.
Of course, learning APIs is necessary, but everytime I find myself wading through
API documentation, I stop and ask myself whether it will still be relevant in
a few years time; often the API will change, or even worse (I'm thinking of React
here), the whole ecosystem will probably have disappeared in 5 years time.
This talk[1] makes a similar case.
Obviously, if someone wanted to pay me to learn and use React, that would be a
different matter.