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cnorthwood

1,349 karma · joined December 28, 2013

Website: https://cjn.me.uk | Twitter: @cnorthwood | I wrote a book! The Full Stack Developer: https://is.gd/fullstackbook
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cnorthwood··on The limits of high-speed rail
They do this in South East UK using a dedicated third rail for power. As I understand it, the limit is 100mph for this technology, although I don't know the physics, so it's not even fast enough for classic High Speed
cnorthwood··on Show HN: Store your luggage in local shops
I think the days of Airbnb being "rent out a spare room" are gone, whenever I look, most Airbnb properties tend to be used as dedicated short-term lets and has supplanted the old holiday letting market.
cnorthwood··on New study: The advertising industry is systematically breaking EU law
The problem is really that the indie developer doesn't really have any monetisation options other than those which break the law, but in theory it's not overly onerous to pick one that at least claims to be GDPR compliant. They should be able to trust that their suppliers aren't providing them illegal products tbh.
cnorthwood··on Lime shuts in 12 markets, lays off around 100
They may also have "independent contractors" to do the work
cnorthwood··on Incident: Wizz Air and Air Europa Planes in Near Collision over Spain
Vatsim exists which allows you to be ATC for real players on flight simulator games (there are plugins for multiple)
cnorthwood··on Zwitterion: a web dev server that lets you import anything
You don't have to use React. The template gives it to you, but if you delete all the code and never import React, you're never using it. I use CRA nowadays for either simple vanilla JS/SCSS brochure-ware sites, or for simple TypeScript sites
cnorthwood··on Who eats who in open source
Under the philosophy of the FSF, that'd be the "commons", i.e., the users of the software take on responsibility for adding new features or fixing bugs that affect them, and then contributing it back.
cnorthwood··on Uber loses licence to operate in London, will still operate while appealing
I'm not entirely sure it's fair to say that London's minicab market was particularly corrupt. Uber's real success in London was marketing and investment meaning that it'd could grow rapidly, I believe Addison Lee had a booking app concept at the time, so not even that was particularly new.
cnorthwood··on Save .org
It possibly fits within the portfolio of the ITU (although I guess the UN is intergovernmental, rather than a government).
cnorthwood··on Sacha Baron Cohen Uses ADL Speech to Tear Apart Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook
> There are no sounds that I can make with my mouth that are dangerous.

Shouting fire in a crowded theatre that could lead to a stampede that puts people in danger. Deliberately misinforming people about the risk of an action they are about to take could be too.

cnorthwood··on Are Passenger Jet Engines Hitting Their Technical Limits?
London Victoria rail station averages ~207k passengers per day. London Heathrow airport average ~211k. Doesn't feel that unfeasible.
cnorthwood··on Via-ipv6.com: enabling IPv4 sites for IPv6 only networks
There are parts of the world where IP exhaustion is forcing the hand of ISPs. My home broadband connection is with a fairly minor player who don't have the address space of the incumbent telcos (but do full FttH), so I have native IPv6 connectivity, but IPv4 is through CGNAT. So I think the momentum is coming, just slowly.
cnorthwood··on The tech behind building an independent, internet radio station
There's essentially no multicast over the public internet
cnorthwood··on Storm Area 51: The joke that became a ‘possible humanitarian disaster’
The Constitution limits what the government can do, not private citizens or corporations.
cnorthwood··on Ask HN: Looking for an Alternative to Jira
You can get reasonably far with Trello, if all you're doing is item tracking. If you're trying to do anything more than a free-for-all workflow, or wanting to do reporting, it's less good.
cnorthwood··on Kdevops: Framework for setting up and testing the Linux kernel for any project
This looks cool, but I'm not sure what it has to do with devops? It just seems to be automated test environment provisioning, am I missing something?
cnorthwood··on Teen's tweets from her smart fridge go viral after mother confiscates phone
We do in the UK at least, although compliance is problematic: https://www.asa.org.uk/resource/influencers-guide.html for some info
cnorthwood··on Mosquitoes Changed Everything
There's a lot of interesting work in eradicating malaria. Genetically modified mosquitos is one of them, which deserves careful watch https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas....

The Centre for Effective Altruism looks at ranking charities on effectiveness, and the Against Malaria Foundation always ranks very highly.

cnorthwood··on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages
I think Twitter DMs are having issues too...
cnorthwood··on Zapping Nuclear Waste in Minutes Is Nobel Winner’s Holy Grail Quest
Yes, and even being crashed into by another train: https://youtu.be/ZY446h4pZdc
cnorthwood··on 5g Detrimental to Insects
The title is editorialised ("5g Detrimental to Insects") which is not what the original title is, nor what the conclusion actually states - which is that at >6GHz RF energy absorption increases. The conclusion suggests that this may have effects, but didn't actually study those or figure out what they were.
cnorthwood··on The practical value of semantic HTML
there's a difference between the semantic web and semantic HTML though - semantic HTML is particularly important for giving accessibility hints for example.
cnorthwood··on Call for testing: OpenSSH 8.0
Interesting that they seem to use CVS as the canonical source control repo. I wonder what the workflows of the dev team look like and if that tool makes it harder for external contributors to contribute?
cnorthwood··on Addressing Spotify’s Claims
Yes, it's gratis, not libre. I understood the parent comment to be referring to the price.
cnorthwood··on Addressing Spotify’s Claims
Xcode is now free: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/xcode/id497799835?mt=12 (although you still have to have a mac)
cnorthwood··on A Front End Does Not Have to Be Rich
I'm not sure how you drew the last 2 conclusions from this article. The point is to make sure people think twice before they default to an SPA to make sure it's the right decision - in my experience a lot of people are jumping to the SPA pattern without considering the alternatives. Do you not think an article like this, which aims to increase awareness of non-SPA architectures, is helping to make it better? What else would you like to have seen this article cover?
cnorthwood··on CovenantForum – A decentralized forum powered by CovenantSQL
This is an interesting application. I wonder how it deals with abuse (e.g., libellous content that needs to be removed), a DELETE operation added to the blockchain? (I guess the content still exists in the blockchain but not in the database)
cnorthwood··on Potholes to avoid when migrating to IPv6
Ports operate a different layer in the OSI model - the transport layer, not the network layer (which IP operates on). Ports are TCP and UDP concepts (e.g., a different application can bind to TCP port 443 than UDP port 443, as they're essentially different ports). Some protocols don't have ports at all, e.g., ICMP, which instead has a "type".
cnorthwood··on As the U.S. fantasizes, the rest of the world builds new transport system (2017)
It's only 2hrs 15mins if you go the longer way via Crewe, the more direct services via Stoke with fewer stops are around 2hrs 5mins. It also depends on your definition of high speed train, the original definition is 125mph, which the Pendolino definitely is (and is actually the max speed of the British train called the High Speed Train). We keep redefining what High means... HS2 with a max speed of 186mph will be 67minutes.
cnorthwood··on O2 outage due to expired Ericsson certificate
I suspect it was a root CA (they possibly had a private PKI) that expired - I saw a tweet suggesting that they had to manually apply a fix to every deployment of the software, which is consistent with having to change the trust chain.
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