Normille

  >How do people find your blog?

Mind you, I just write about things that tickle my fancy or which annoy me. So I've definitely not got a 'target demographic' --unless there's some othe poor sods out there with the same eclectic interest as me.

Mainly I just write my blog because I like writing and I like using language. So it's more just scratching a personal itch than anything intended to draw a lot of traffic. For me, writing occasional blog posts is the literary counterpart of doodling in my sketchbooks [which I've also been doing since forever].

I don't have any stats-gathering software running on my blog. So I don't even know how many visitors I get. The only way I can ascertain there are any at all is from occasional comments being posted. Ironically, jusdging by this metric, my most popular articles seem to be fairly run of the mill 'how-tos' rather than the ones I'm most pleased with, from a 'quality of my writing' point of view.

When I read your opening 'I wonder if there's somewhere that people can propose a name for things and people can tell them why they might want to use something else...' I thought you were going to go on to make a point about not using everyday words [or single letters] as the name for your new programming language, as they'll be unsearchable. And everyone will end up tagging -lang' onto the end of the name, to discriminate.

EDIT: I was a fiver out. A 'pony' is apparently £25:

https://www.cockneyrhymingslang.co.uk/subjects/money

  >It was low quality. Setting up a business in the UK, for example, costs £40....

  >I looked up once how one starts a business in a few European countries and what taxes are. The processes I found were really expensive...

Fill in an online form. Pay your twelve quid [they even take PayPal] and --Hey Presto!-- you're now a company director.

https://www.gov.uk/set-up-limited-company

  >There's nominal UK resistance to ID cards because the right-wing fascist papers say there is. I'm not convinced the population is all that bothered...

In the UK there's a very strong cultural association [countless films, TV dramas] etc. equating national ID cards with humourless totalitarian officials demanding to see 'Your papers!'. Hence the inherent distaste for the concept of having to carry something that proves who you are to any officious git in a uniform, who cares to ask for it.

Of course the irony is that, outside of passports, the UK pretty much has acquired a de facto national ID card by stealth, in the form of the photocard driving licence.

It's almost always the 'other' document you can use whenever reuired to prove your identity, if you don't have a passport. And the government is trying very hard to get people still holding the older [non photo] paper driving licences to 'upgrade' to a new photocard driving licence. Not only by extolling its benefits, but by threatening heavy fines for anyone whose details have changed in any way on their old paper licence and who hasn't immediately updated it.

  >U.S. scientists have achieved “ignition” —  a fusion reaction that produced more energy than it took to create...

  >The inefficient lasers used in the experiment required about 300 megajoules of energy to fire just 2 megajoules of energy into the experiment. The reaction produced about 3 megajoules of energy...

  >The issue in the UK is that the Police suffers from scope creep. The UK police force has been criticized for expanding its scope to include enforcing anti-hate crime laws and investigating "non-crime hate incidents."...

Obviously these cases are rare [that's why they make headlines], But the fact they happen at all doesn't do the police's reputation any favours, when there are 'actual' crimes being effectively ignored through claimed lack of resources.

I used to cycle to work down a pavement which was divided into half for walking on and half cycle lane. I lost count of the number of times I had to swerve round people strolling along [often in the dedicated cycle lane part] with their phone either clamped to the side of their head or held out in front of them watching something on screen --completely oblivious to the world around them.

If I'd been of a criminal disposition, I could have trivially plucked the phones from these people's hands and been away and out of reach before they even realised what was going on. And I could have harvested 3 or 4 phones every day this way. And that's, just commuting to work, not actually seeking out victims.

I generally have sympathy for anyone who gets their 'stuff' stolen. But not much I'm afraid for the kind of people who can't even walk down the street without their fucking phone permanently attached to their face. Completely ignorant of the fact they're getting in other people's way and almost causing accidents, wherever they go.

  >Because the US has both historically demonstrated will and irrefutable capacity to pay its debt...

At the end of the day, the entire western capitlist system is a huge house of cards. which would collapse if all the debts were ever called in. But, since the US is the driver of said sytem, the world turns a blind eye to the fact that, if the US was a person, it would be bankrupt.

Instead, --like someone living beyond their means but buying a lottery ticket every weekend-- they just keep on printing more dollars and borrowing more money, in some kind of vague expectation that 'something' will sort it all out in the end.

And these people have the gall to point the finger at cryptocurrencies and label them a 'Ponzi scheme'

Eeeny-meeny is not a counting system. Why would people use a nonsense rhyme to count things? It makes no sense (literally!). Eeny-meeny is used as a 'random selection system' when choosing arbitrarily from a series of options.

Odd to get that basic fact wrong in such an in-depth article.

This on top of the already fuckwitted ability for anyone in a conversation to delete their messages in the conversation 'for both parties'.

Incredibly they are touting the fact that their app lets other people delete MY content on MY devices [and now do it automatically!] as delivering the 'ultimate privacy'.

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Telegram's unique combination of removing messages for all participants without a trace, and controlling existing and future chats with auto-delete timers gives you full ownership of your entire message history. Together with using your account without a SIM card it delivers ultimate privacy.

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I'll continue to use Telegram for my casual converstions with family and friends. Because, for what it is, it's probably the best messaging app out there. But I can't believe the people behind it can't see that allowing someone else to delete data from my computer, without my permission is a BAD THING™

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/government-debt-t...

Being a stalwart defender of 'free-dam & deee-mocracy' the US shrugs and says ' Oh well. It was the will of the people. Nothing we can do about it'

</Jackanory>

  >As far as I remember, it was still possible (in terms of banking systems/santions) to pay the gas in Euros as usual; Russia decided, unilaterally, that they would require the payment to be in Rubles (to try and limit its plummeting value)...

Maybe you're right and EU/UK could still have paid in Euros but, with Russia being frozen out of the world's banking system, they [Russia] wouldn't have actually been able to access the money. So it pretty much amounts to the same thing. They'd be giving the gas away.

If you were working on a job for someone and suddenly had your bank accounts frozen, it wouldn't be unreasonable for you to tell the person employing you that, while you were happy to keep on working, since you couldn't access your bank account, you'd need to be paid in cash for the rest of your time.

And you'd rightly feel aggrieved if that person refused, but then put it about that you were an unreliable worker who'd walked off the job.

  >What had not been foreseen was the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the associated general energy crisis in Europe... 

  >Can't forsee covid though, nor the war in Ukraine...

No-one in the corridors of power in the EU or UK, apparently.

  >lawyer Anatoly Kucherena said, according to Russia’s Interfax news agency. “...under the Constitution of Russia, he can no longer be extradited to a foreign state...”

Not like all those western countries which will extradite their own citizens to the US at the drop of a hat --The US being, of course, a nation which retains the death penalty and has admitted to torturing detainees and which therefore should be automatically out of bounds for for extradition, according to most western democracies' constitutions.

But, hey ho! it's the USA. The rules the rest of the world has to abide by don't apply to them.

[0] https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/102.0/eoy/

*I don't know where I go that from. It's just one of those random trivia 'facts' lodged in my noggin, which is probably bollocks.

  >people were complaining that the same Elon Musk tweet got submitted at least 5 times in 30 minutes….

Mind you, the throbbing vein in my temple, on that score, has stopped since I added this line to my uBlock Origin filters....

news.ycombinator.com#?#tr.athing > td.title > span:-abp-contains(/[Tt]witter/):upward(tr)

  >It's official (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), and it's not limited to Show HNs.

Are reposts ok?

If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.

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Unfortunately, since there's no penalty for spamming the site with endless repeat posts of articles already submitted countless times before, people continue to do it. Contrast that with the comments section, where there are penalties for abusive behaviour and people generally tend to behave in a more respectful way to other HN-ers.

I wonder; if the system really did check for duplication [I can't believe it does, given the number of repeat posts I see] and if people lost a karma point* for submitting an article that had already been submitted X times within the last X hours or days, would we see a lot less 'submission spamming'?

*Assuming that the people posting what are obviously repeat submission are doing so for the 'internet points' rather than from any genuine belief that they're sharing something new with us, that might actually be a deterrent.

This seems like a really simplistic calculation, which takes no account of the real-world experience using printers.

Unless you're using them on an almost daily basis, inkjets clog up all the time. Forcing you to waste more electricity, paper and ink, trying to get the feckers to print cleanly again.

They also have chipped cartridges which refuse to print when they decide there's no ink left [based purely on a print count. None of them actually measure remaining ink].

The cartridges last nowhere near as long as those on a laser printer. And so more packaging and plastic waste is generated when having to replace them so regularly.

I finally got rid of my expensive Canon inkjet about 7 or 8 months ago because I only print very occasionally these days and, every time I did, it ended up being a half hour or more ordeal of head cleaning, cartridge molyycoddling and general wall headbutting, just to print something really simple like a label for an envelope.

I replaced it with an el cheapo Brother laser printer which has given me absolutely zero problems so far. In fact yesterday I had to print a label and I sent it to the Brother laser printer [which I hadn't used in probably a month]. It woke up, spat out the print and then went back to sleep again. Total time [and therefore electricity use] about 10 seconds. It would have had to be the most inefficient device ever made to have used more electricity & resources [paper and ink] in tha time than that damned inkjet would have done during its marathon 'how many ways can I annoy you?' session.

  >I subscribed the Guardian for one year just to avoid that it goes down (I could read it for free at work), and of course it is excellent, but it has a tacit pro-UK bias that brits (esp. leftists) wouldn't even notice. On the other hand they have excellent reporting and do not refrain from the most challenging topics...

When I originally used to read The 'Graun' back in the 80s 90s, it was a crusading paper which did cover 'challenging topics' --such as Britain's role in Northern Ireland, US bases in Europe, Britain's membership of NATO, nuclear disarmament, class struggle, etc. etc. ie. proper socialist politics.

Now, whenever I look at their website all I see are endless articles about racism, hompophobia, transgenderism... whether what X said on Twitter was racist... whether Y's opinion on sport is transgenderist etc. etc. Issues which the current crop of Guardian journalists probably think are terrifically 'crusading' and 'challenging' but which are just pushing at the same open door as every other 'right on' publication and website around and which I find tedious beyond measure. Virtue signalling trivia masquerading as crusading journalism.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurring_jokes_in_Private_Eye