Hacker News Reader

arethuzaon Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

Senior leaders in large companies I've worked at always had a fairly high turnover just because they all tend to be hyper competitive and engaged in their own Game of Thrones type competitions - which someone has to lose.

arethuzaon Show HN: Are You in the Weights?

Reminds me of the scene from Devs:

"The box contains us, the box contains everything and inside the box there's another box"

arethuzaon The 2-Year Apartment Rule

"Even though the house is really old"

Apart from a brief spell when I was very young and my family lived in a 1950s council house I've never lived in a building as new as that... and I'm 60 and have lived in 11 different properties. But that's the UK and Edinburgh for you...

Edit: Never had any mould problems but then again most of the places I lived had draughty sash windows...

arethuzaon The Australian Government to Require SMS/MMS Sender ID Registraion

Is that to restart the call to the same person or a case id that gives details of your request and that could be passed to anyone?

arethuzaon The Australian Government to Require SMS/MMS Sender ID Registraion

Yes, was just relating my experience - it's just go the the point where I personally opt to play safe. Like everyone I do get calls from people who aren't in my contact list but it was getting silly so I've defaulted to ignoring them and it works for me. Anyone serious is going to be happy leaving a message - which suits me anyway as I spend a large part of my work day in Teams calls.

arethuzaon The Australian Government to Require SMS/MMS Sender ID Registraion

Just looking at my incoming call list on my phone for yesterday: "Suspected Spam", "Suspected Spam", "Suspected Spam", "Potential Fraud", "Suspected Spam", "Suspected Spam", a real call, "Suspected Spam", "Suspected Spam"...

Phone is set to only notify me for numbers for known contacts - does mean that I occasionally miss calls from other people, but I can live with that.

arethuzaon Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?

"It’s just a network of individuals selling products, promoting each other’s products, and creating new avenues to sell more products"

That's hardly unique to the self-help world - doesn't a lot of tech also fall into that category?

arethuzaon 'Wow, it really worked ': 70s TV show causing worldwide panic today

I'm pretty sure I watched this when it was broadcast - when I was 12. It was fairly clear to me at the time it wasn't a real documentary.

arethuzaon Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

Probably sublime... who knows!

arethuzaon Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

I can see why you might think that - but people and machines and groups are free to leave if they want - at least one of the Culture stories is based on this: e.g. "A Gift from the Culture".

arethuzaon CrankGPT

I now have visions of an Apple Extended Extended Keyboard that comes with a crank...

arethuzaon A short history of Cerro Torre, the most controversial mountain (2012)

I don't think it's just a matter of ethics - some legal entity owns these mountains (park authority of some kind?) and drilling holes and placing bolts done without the permission of the owner sounds like vandalism to me.

arethuzaon European sentiments towards the US hit an all-time low

And I think even before 1950 there was a feeling, particularly in the US, that it was good to have the Germans on-side in a military conflict due to their recent experience fighting the Soviets.

arethuzaon European sentiments towards the US hit an all-time low

The long term viability of the UK nukes does rather depend on support from the US though - they use our own fissile material, but the warhead designs are believed to largely be based on the US W76 and the actual Trident missiles come from a pool controlled by the US.

arethuzaon Mercedes‑Benz starts large‑scale production of electric axial flux motor

I'd like a 600 HP 1.5l supercharged V16 - doesn't even need to be in a car, mainly just to listen to!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Racing_Motors_V16

arethuzaon Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]

Won't they have monitored their slaves quite closely?

arethuzaon Algorithmic Monocultures in Hiring

One thing I discovered years ago was that even if you are pretty good at soft-skills type stuff and also pretty good at technical stuff what I couldn't do is context switch between an hour or so of doing "soft" stuff to a technical question - even though it was a trivial question. I lost a CTO position over that - mind you I think they went out of business a couple of years later...

arethuzaon LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

I remember working with a corporate customer whose in house architecture team was so difficult to work with that I joked that they could be replaced by a rule in their email system that simply replied "No" as the message if I ever emailed them.

arethuzaon Under Notre Dame, a 'dig of the century' unearths 1,700 years of history

The whole region is awesome for food and wine - we did a walk (over few days) from Santa Maria di Leuca to Otranto - sometimes along the coast and sometimes in paths through the lovely countryside. We started and ended that trip in Lecce - staying in a few agriturismos along the way, all of which had sublime food.

We've also been to Bari as well - which has a lovely old town as does Otranto - where the town centre is basically one large fortress.

One very pleasant surprise we had was using the Frecciarossa express train - we had two business class seats for a journey of a couple of hours and it was less than 50 euros and it was extremely comfortable!

arethuzaon The placeholder name for the Windows 8 experience was "modern"

My name for the Windows 11 experience is "Linux Mint"... ;-)

arethuzaon Under Notre Dame, a 'dig of the century' unearths 1,700 years of history

There is a wonderful museum it the Italian city of Lecce that started when someone went to fix some plumbing in their house and ended up finding so much amazing historical stuff that they ended up opening the house as a museum:

https://www.museofaggiano.it/en/home/

And that's just one house in one city in one country!

Edit: I strongly recommend the museum, Lecce and indeed all of Puglia!

arethuzaon CT scans of BYD car parts

A few years back my wife had a Toyota that had serious electrical problems (all instruments would stop working) that was eventually traced to a faulty sunroof combined with a terrible design...

arethuzaon Experience: We found a baby on the subway – now he's our 26-year-old son

Personally I would be more worried that the woman that had just given birth received the appropriate medical attention and help with whatever circumstances made her feel that she had to abandon her child.

arethuzaon The first British person in space

And the old Top Gear team did have a record of trying their best to combine rocket technology with cars...

arethuzaon India's hottest district shuts at 10 am as mercury breaches 48 C mark

I'm in Scotland and I've never wanted air conditioning at home and I'm someone who really doesn't like warm temperatures. Mind you - it doesn't get that cold here as we are next to the sea but it also never gets unpleasantly warm.

arethuzaon Details of the Daring Airdrop at Tristan Da Cunha

Immigration to the UK is not at an all time high - both immigration and net migration are down pretty sharply:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c70989jrdweo

arethuzaon Details of the Daring Airdrop at Tristan Da Cunha

And the English back to various corners of north west Europe and the Scots back to Scythia!

arethuzaon Swift bricks to be installed on all new buildings in Scotland

I live in rural Fife - effectively in the middle of a farm. We get mice in the house in October or so when it starts getting colder - never seen a rat here. Oddly I've never seen a fox here although I used to see them all the time when we lived in central Edinburgh.

arethuzaon Swift bricks to be installed on all new buildings in Scotland

"Starlings declined by 57% between 1995 and 2023 and they now feature on the Red List of birds of high conservation concern."

https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/starling

arethuzaon Classic 7 is a Windows 10 LTSC mod to look 1:1 to Windows 7

My main issue with Windows 11 (and where I use it I do see quite a lot of issues) is that apparently it won't run on my personal PC at home - and no way am I going to buy a new PC just to run Windows 11. So installed Linux Mint and I'm perfectly happy!