arooaroo

I put my phone’s brightness down to minimum at night. Nonetheless I use HN purposely as a dim light when the phone’s torch would be too bright and a beige glow does the job splendidly. (Typically, when I’m moving around the house late at night and everyone else is asleep - when pitch black the torch is too extreme.)

That said, given the amount of time I spend reading on the site I do wish there was a dark mode option.

Amen. This is an issue at the company I work at. Common typos when looking up has keys will return nil - this has a tendency to silently keep working and blow up with a runtime error further down the chain. I am trying to insist on using .fetch to force an exception.

When the company switches to 3.2 I will insist on everyone using the new Data class for value objects rather than hashes.

A couple of things jump out:

1. Dahl had already made changes to the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The early editions had African pygmies as his free labour. I don’t think the world was “woke” back then.

2. This is being done by a corporate publishing house in order to maximise the revenue of one of its key IP assets. It’s not mandated by government/regulation; there is no viral social media furore or press campaign. It’s not censorship nor anything like 1984 where works are being revised and all traces of the previous version cease to exist.

This is known as the Peter Principle.

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

I’m on fibre. Last month I had a lot of video calls on zoom, Google Meet, MS Teams and even WebEx. Google was by far the most reliable and MS Teams was frequently a complete mess with participants unable to converse and merely an observer. And every person who set up a Teams meeting with me began with a preface about the miserable experiences they’ve been having with Teams of late.

I don’t use it myself so can’t really give a good review but my window into the world of long term users would suggest that saying you were cut off wouldn’t strike anyone else as unusual.

I immediately like this project for being “framework independent” rather than agnostic. It’s odd how computing has fashioned a completely different sense for “agnostic” despite perfectly adequate and well understood words already existing.

Manning also have a book on Lucene, the library that powers Solr and ElasticSearch. IIRC the book covered how Lucene actually works under-the-good and would therefore act as a good reference on the subject in general.

Anyone have recommendations on storing crypto outside of coinbase?

I’ve used them to buy a small amount and they make it pretty easy, but concerned that they are not necessarily the best place to store once acquired.

TIA

Keeping the temperature of the bedroom cold made a big difference for me.

I’ve been listening to audiobooks and podcasts for years and that helped better than not, but turning the radiator off and ensuring the bedroom was cold meant the vast majority of nights meant I went from listening at least an hour a night to often falling asleep within 15mins or less.

I had read Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker and I highly recommend it. Changed my attitude completely - it’s now higher priority.

This is bring back a lot of memories - in a former life I took care of digital products for dictionaries at Pearson Longman, and one of my favourite projects was developing a generic dictionaries platform for iOS apps, that allowed me to produce about eight dictionary apps published on the app store. All long gone now - no trace of them which is a shame.

The Longman brand was associated with English as a second language, so all our digital products came with audio pronunciations, plus a lot of photos/illustrations. In some products we also had a simple quiz engine to test comprehension. So a lot of data to cram into each app.

Like now, it seems that SQLite does a lot of heavy lifting. A lot of time was spent making a pipeline that could get lexicographic material in to a searchable database, plus the associated sound and image assets. I recall that the SQLite lib built-in to iOS wasn't good enough, so I had to compile my own build and bundle within each app.

The Longman dictionary data was really good. At the time a lot of the free dictionary apps were using WordNet (which isn't even a typical dictionary) because wikitionary wasn't where is it now. I bet there are more avenues to acquire decent, free, lexical resources.

And it’s not exactly a UX paradise if one is a premium customer either. I really find the UI hard work on desktop and mobile.

If and when Apple Music introduces a Duo equivalent tariff I will jump ship, for many reasons but a significant one is that I use Spotify exclusively for music yet it’s UI takes up a significant amount of premium space for podcasts. Apple had seen the light and spun off podcasts to a separate app from music.

Dart is also a Google conceived language but it’s not exactly what I’d call popular despite only hearing positive things about the language itself.

Unlike Swift or Kotlin that are heavily entwined with the main mobile platforms, nobody needs to use Golang for any particular reason. As far as I can tell its developer experience is pretty good so people have opted for it because it fits their needs.

I was a happy client of Maslins when I switched from sole trader to limited company. I was doing freelance software development so the switch was a doddle. You get a FreeAgent account as part of the deal and they have access to it to oversea your accounts. They will also do your personal self assessment for you too.

I’m sure they will be able to advise on your situation.

My local Sainsbury’s supermarket used to have a cardboard cutout police officer in the window as a crime prevention tool.

I seem to recall it being fairly common at the time. Clearly we humans are easily nudged with these visual cues.

+1 I’m keen on finding engaging maths content for my 8yo.

Writer Ben Macintyre has written extensively, and lucidly, about deception campaigns of WWI. Agent Zigzag, Operation Mincemeat, and Double Cross all capture the efforts made by the British and its allies. No individual operation swung it but there was an amalgamation of disinformation on various fronts. It’s hard to put a tangible outcome, other than intercepted messages did show the Germans were giving the disinformation due consideration.

I highly recommend any of Ben Macintyre’s books as they’re hugely accessible.

Reminds me of Flight of the Conchords’ Hurt Feeling song in which they are trying to portray themselves as rappers:

“Some people think rappers are invincible. We’re vincable.”

https://youtu.be/EuJzSTNDUGI

IntelliJ is great, PyCharm is good. But RubyMine is the one I’ve used daily for years and it’s a bit of a dog’s dinner and I think getting progressively worse over the years.

I’ve been summarising issues lately:

- https://andyroberts-uk.medium.com/rubymine-code-insights-or-...

- https://medium.com/swlh/rubymine-more-distractions-part-2-24...

I recall (albeit vaguely) reading an interesting book "Renegades of the Empire: How Three Software Warriors Started a Revolution Behind the Walls of Fortress" by Michael Drummond.

My recollection of the genesis of DirectX was in fact a skunkworks project create their vision of the next generation web-browsing experience. I think it was demoed and they had begun touting to developers/publishers with work with, but was axed.

I think it had a 3D aspect to it -- perhaps all 3d, I can't recall. But my memory was that they needed a significant 3D library, and they didn't want to go down the OpenGL (I think it was fundamentally political and personality disagreements with themselves and the maintainer(s) of the OpenGL implementation within MS) They convinced their boss to acquire a company that had a 3d engine product and hacked together a more comprehensive library, that ultimately became DirectX.

I’ve mentioned this previously but it’s on topic and still amazes me, so I’ll just copy & paste:

I know someone who works at one of the London airports and is responsible for keeping the runway operational. One of the jobs is keeping the birds well clear, and if necessary, sadly, may resort to shooting. The crows know the score though. This acquiantance says the crows know to disappear if they see the bird clearers. What's "clever" is that they only take flight if it's one of the shooters. They recognise the veichle(s) despite them being all the same fleet. So if someone else is driving round to check something else, the birds completely ignore. If it's the "bird guy" then off they go with little encouragement.

That was a delightful thread.

There’s a good BBC podcast about this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07nkd84

(Seems to be present on all major podcast platforms too.)

The problem is that a lot of the investment comes from the large automotive manufacturers. Despite the fans and media interest in the drivers' championship, what really counts within the sport is the constructors' championship (the two are strongly correlated, of course).

What makes the sport more interesting to the fans is not necessarily what motivates teams to participate. One could argue that there are many other formula and racing formats that get that balance between the car and driver, but it's not necessarily something that gets people tuning in. People watch F1 because it's supposed to be pinnacle of automotive engineering and racing. So if I'm a team boss of one of the top 3 teams, I'm not going to be interested in artificially handicapping the sport so that the smaller teams can get in the mix.

However, they've seen repeatedly that fans get bored when it's the same couple of teams who are wrangling for the podium and there's not much excitement per race. So teams at the top will begrudgingly let the regulations be altered to try and spice things up, but nothing too significant. Unfortunately it'll take a downturn in F1 rights income & viewership to make the teams think twice about how to fight this tension between the competitiveness vs status quo. But then the big teams will think, why am I investing hundreds of millions in F1 when I'm not winning when I can spend a fraction in DTM or Le Mans and start building up prestige from other events.

Take the Monaco race, the quintessential F1 race. Watch the pole position lap from the driver's viewpoint and it's the up there with the most amazing 70secs you've seen in sport. However, watch the full race and it's typically a dull procession. As a fan I'd be glad to see the back of it, but sport itself love it.

On paper it looks like Mercedes are dominant and have been since the V6 engine era. For sure the first couple of years they had a massive lead.

But the stats disguise the fight; the fact that Mercedes have won didn't mean their position wasn't earned, frankly they've had a fair slice of luck in several races. For the last two or three years one could easily argue that Ferrari had the means to take them on and beat them, but their campaigns have unravelled for various reasons. Many races they've had to earn that win and many seasons where there was a fight throughout.

The fact that Maclaren has vanished into obscurity despite originally having a Merc engine, and RedBull and Ferrari getting in others faces so often has actually allowed Mercedes to keep their head down and get on with bringing home their maximum potential points haul per race.

I wish I still had the ability to block out ~3 hrs per day on race weekend. Alas those days are long gone.

A few years back, the free-to-air channel, Channel 4, lost the exclusive rights to broadcast the live events. Sky bought them up. Nowadays the Channel 4 offering has become a highlights package, and frankly that's been a pretty good outcome for me. Actually, I don't mind the reduced coverage of the actual car-on-track phase, but it's also not as in-depth on the pre-/post-race analysis, which was where a large chunk of the interest, intrigue and drama occurs.

Also, being able to record using a DVR means I can just tune in whenever it suits me, even if I'm dipping in for 15-30mins over a number of days. At least there's often two weeks between races.

People who are not normally interested in F1 are finding the Netflix series Drive to Survive a more accessible version to spectate. It's not just highlights in chronological order, but a distillation of the main themes of the season, e.g., certain inter-team battles, intra-team rivalries, fallouts between teams and suppliers, regulations, etc. The behind-the-scenes glimpses are fascinating.

I remember (pre-family when I could easily give-up a large chunk of my weekend) tuning in to the beginning of TV coverage on Saturdays (qualifying) and Sundays (race day) primarily to watch all the build-up about the developments since the previous race, particularly all the new technical changes; the relentless engineering efforts are immense and we only get a tiny glimpse of it.

These cars could in theory be even faster. They stopped in season testing years ago; there are limits to the amount of high performance computing they can do; many parts are standardised. There's a tension in the way the sport is regulated to constrain the vast budgets of the larger teams so that smaller teams can try and compete, and ideally new teams enter the sport too. In addition, the aerodymics evolved to such a degree that the wake each car leaves behind makes it almost impossible for cars to follow closely and overtake, leading to uninspiring processions on race days. So regulations are constantly being added to try and ensure a spectacle (DRS, degrading tyres, forcing sub-optimal front and rear wings). But they continue to innovate at a staggering pace.

When DRS (Drag Reduction System -- used in set portions of the straights, a car that's within 1 sec of a car can deploy DRS, that causes the rear wing to have less drag and can potentially allow an overtake). But absolutely amazing lateral thinking from the teams saw innovations like the "F-duct" that was eventually banned and then the so-called "Double DRS". They are channeling relatively small amounts of air-flow through little vents and holes to create small but improvements to their aero performance.

And when in-season testing was removed, all teams rolled out state-of-the-art digital car simulators that have become incredible sophisticated; they design new aerodynamic parts, such as a tiny adjustments to their front-wing, then they test the part on the simulator before actually building and taking to the next race.

Lol. Couldn't resist https://i.redd.it/efmm0153po551.png

If only he’d travelled to Scunthorpe!

I dare say for any UK based user they are still seeing their fair share of Cummings memes, jokes, rage, vitriol, etc. regardless.

Frankly any feature to reduce over-exposure to this farce will be blessed relief.

There's a good doc on YouTube covering the case. The pressure looks immense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V58kK4r26yk

Interesting aside: one of the pro bono lawyers was Keir Starmer, now Sir Keir Starmer who went on to become Director of Public Prosecutions, before entering politics, and recently elected Leader of Her Majesty's Most Loyal Opposition. By all accounts he's showing up our utterly useless PM for the incompetent fool he is.

I know someone who works at one of the London airports and is responsible for keeping the runway operational. One of the jobs is keeping the birds well clear, and if necessary, sadly, may resort to shooting.

The crows know the score though. This acquiantance says the crows know to disappear if they see the bird clearers. What's "clever" is that they only take flight if it's one of the shooters. They recognise the veichle(s) despite them being all the same fleet. So if someone else is driving round to check something else, the birds completely ignore. If it's the "bird guy" then off they go with little encouragement.