bencollier49

It was such a great idea that I couldn't not jump on the Kickstarter. It was a little pricey, but the case, build, presentation and software were all terrific. The team did an amazing job.

Yes! I've pretty much watched it to death... I was always an Acorn fan, but these days I also have a ZX Spectrum Next.

Ouch, that one made me wince!

The RaspPi is very much an heir of the Acorn machines. Obviously your point still stands, but...

I wonder if they were working with recruiters who were scraping LinkedIn photos.

Very unusual practice for the UK, and slightly dubious, IMO.

Paradise Lost?

It's interesting - someone looked at their smart plug and it was pulling 1.2W, the cost of which comes to more than some of the devices they might be attached to - assumes saving electricity is your only goal - in that case not necessarily the best bet.

I find the reuse of the term "datasette" quite jarring. You'll pollute my retro searches! :-)

The same thing happened with the "BBC Micro:bit" which was roughly in the same field, unlike this one.

The BBC ran an interesting piece of advice this morning on saving money from "vampire devices":

"There are smart plugs you can buy which will let you check everything is turned off from your phone".

How much power do the smart plugs use to listen on wifi?

> I can't sell paper outside the UK any more.

What is this down to? Export regulations? Could you use print on demand or something instead?

Agree totally with this. It's been exacerbated by the Crossrail work at Tottenham Court Road, which seems to have completely cut out the heart of the area - related to the issues at Denmark Street and elsewhere, like the Astoria.

Am I missing something fundamental here? What have London sweet shops got to do with UK government spending? Rents on Oxford Street, perhaps? Or is this a foreign key problem?

EDIT: I think the parent poster has added a last line to clarify, or maybe I missed it to begin with. Makes sense now.

I totally disagree - he's demonstrating that what appeared to be the scientific consensus on several occasions in the past was completely wrong.

"It's not banning arguments, just recognising that the public sphere isn't the best place for certain arguments."

And so on. That feels like a slippery slope to me.

Does this mean that languages become more synthetic if they're left on their own? Did Latin and Sanskrit develop in greater isolation? This is a fascinating subject.

That's a great graphic.

I can't figure out what it is doing this - I'm UK-based too, and I know logically that everything is now safer - I used to walk two miles to the woods with friends at the age of eight or nine, but I wouldn't trust my own children to walk to the bottom of the hill here.

I don't really understand what has changed. Why were my own parents less paranoid? There are lots of people giving lots of reasons on here. The most credible is the constant "stranger danger" message pumped out in news, but I honestly wonder if there's been a baseline increase in people's general paranoia - my concerns are more around them doing something stupid and getting into trouble.

I've been interested for some time in how he's handling the building control people....

Unfortunately, this will be very popular with schoolchildren on their homework, so it'll become normalised in culture.

Sounds like you've been assimilated!

English contingent on HN here going peak middle-class. :-)

Speaking as one of them!

I noticed the supermarkets producing copycats and became suspicious of the method by which they achieved the colour. There's something qualitatively different about the darkened yolk in the Clarence Court eggs, and it makes me wonder about additives, I guess they're just adding caretinoids to the feed.

> The creature is speaking English.

That's not a very effective counterargument - the being in question could have communicated in any way and the conversation would have been recounted in English later, unless it used interpretive dance or something.

These experiences seem to be very common. The question that I take from them is around the nature of "love", and how fundamental it is. Most religions feature infinite love and benevolence as a feature of God, and we know that the feeling of love in human beings has a biochemical basis. But is it an essential quality of the universe (like, for example, the structure of space)? Does it actually transcend the universe? I believe it does, in some form, but that's a position formed from a combination of faith and reason.

I wish the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy site could step up and fill this void, but from looking at it, it's covered in ads and not very functional. Shame the BBC ditched it.

I really think there's room for a wiki site which encourages heavy editorialisation and allows dubious information to stay, provided that it isn't outright libellous.

I agree, unless... It could be that they're making most of their money from spikes. It would be interesting if that were the case.

I've said this over and over again. There should be laws in place enabling a person or company to set a hard limit on spend.

It would be a pro-innovation law because people would then have the confidence to innovate.

Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30991278

It was bits and things - I think the writers of Hackers leant fairly heavily on the CDC, from the US, but certainly for me the hacker subculture of that era crossed over with rave stuff originating out of the UK and the film makers picked up on that. We used to use BBSes to find parties.

Related link I found, re. Cybercafe BBS which was important: https://hansonaniboon.wordpress.com/2018/03/31/semiotext-and...

And from there: http://www.irational.org/cybercafe/xrel.html

He's just from the same era. Been around for ages - this is a right blast from the past. "Hackers" used loads of contemporary hacker subculture and adjacent culture. I guess part of that was Megatripolis and acid techno stuff, which is why there's shared DNA here, all the "rave visuals" stuff from the 90s, although this kind of eats that for lunch and spits it out.

As a counterpoint, you should read "Against Method".

I read that as a troll to bite back at Musk's humorous posts of the last couple of days.

> swim in their ideas

Speaking as an accomplished dilettante, I can tell you that the ability to have interesting conversations with anybody about anything is in fact a fairly OP soft skill.

If you're an extrovert, I would encourage you to move into a role where you get plenty of exposure to different people - you'll find that you have a natural edge.

The other major benefit of your approach is that you will build diverse mental models and paradigms for dealing with problems. Try to find your way into some sort of consultancy.