Hacker News Reader

handelaaron British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply

For lots of reasons but if you're the UK and you're honest with yourself and you are only allowed to pick exactly one reason that steel is absolutely critical?

Royal Navy.

handelaaron Telegram's t.me domain has been suspended

> I highly doubt Nauru makes much money selling their ccTLD, they manage it directly on the island and each domain costs a whopping 500$/year.

Yeah, can't imagine anyone buying any of these domains. I mean yes, it's literally the exact word for "naked" in French, but nobody speaks French so there's definitely no chance they make any money

handelaaron Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

> Contrary to what you seem to believe

Please stop doing this. That is not even close to what he said.

"Some people" do that? Not a controversial statement, and pretending otherwise is to argue in bad faith.

handelaaron France's homegrown open source online office suite

> "The average rate of social security and tax state contributions from French workers is now 82% of their salary"

This might be the most insane comment I've ever seen on this forum.

What in the hell are you talking about? Did you actually read that first link, completely fail to understand a single word of it, and then the number 82 just magically fell out of the sky?

handelaaron Show HN: We Built the 1. EU-Sovereignty Audit for Websites

"Fortunately", that country forced its language onto a number of others who remain in the EU, and one of them conveniently has English as its EU language because another country also speaks its actual primary language.

handelaaron How Google got its groove back and edged ahead of OpenAI

https://archive.is/TyJ8q

handelaaron EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages

Because they also recognise English and Greek's already covered by Greece.

handelaaron EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages

Still an official language, thankfully. Officially, because of Cyprus.

handelaaron French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence

(Fellow readers: this is not kneejerk Russia-bashing but a reference to the recorded fact that Sarkozy has received at least hundreds of thousands of euro from Russian government-linked entities, apparently in exchange for favours.)

For example: https://www.mediapart.fr/en/journal/international/110123/nic... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/15/france-investi...

handelaaron Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

Your claim that Ofcom is in any way a "self-regulation body" is untrue. And frankly also a straight-up insane thing to say, sorry.

Ofcom was created by the UK government for the sole purpose of enforcing laws passed by the UK government [and sometimes interpreting those laws]. It acts on behalf of the State at all times, and is not empowered to do otherwise under any circumstances EVER.

You appear to be confused about what being a "quango" actually means in this case. "Quasi-NGO" means that while it appears to be a non-governmental organisation, it is not one. Ofcom's at arm's length because the majority of its daily legal obligations are closer to judicial than administrative, and it is UK custom (rightly) to not put judicial functions inside government departments.

handelaaron Is Wordpress.org GDPR Compliant?

> No. It doesn't give you a right to messages about you.

In the context described (a private organisation holding messages which refer to you personally) this is unbelievably false.

handelaaron The Nursery of the Mac – Apple Computer factory in Cork, Ireland (1996)

They definitely do hardware R&D there [including on major recent launches] and a lot of product assembly. They also advertise production-line automation software gigs periodically for the plant in Little Island (the lesser-known site on the east side of the city which is neither of the offices everyone here knows about).

handelaaron NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

So basically what you're all saying is how it's technically impressive. Okay.

It is also completely and utterly worthless -- an inefficient and slow method of receiving not-very-many words which were written by nobody at all.

The one and only point listening to a discussion about anything is that at least one of the speakers is someone who has an opinion that you may find interesting or refutable. There are no opinions here for you to engage with. There is no expertise here for you to learn from. There is no writing here. There are no people here.

There is nothing of any value here.

handelaaron The Double Irish Dutch Sandwich: End of a Tax Evasion Strategy

This case was about Apple in particular and it is very important to understand that this has never at any point been the law in Ireland as it was understood at the time.

Apple was treated differently to all other companies -- those companies were subject to the laws at the time which allowed multijurisdictional shenanigans as described in the OP link. There was never any legal basis for Revenue's different level of enforcement for Apple alone.

handelaaron The Double Irish Dutch Sandwich: End of a Tax Evasion Strategy

Everyone in Ireland [and almost everyone else] seems to be under the impression that this is what just happened with the CJEU ruling last week. But it's not.

Ireland, since the mid-1980s, has been offering Apple (and ONLY Apple) a bespoke tax arrangement which is not only unlawful state aid under EU rules but also straight-up illegal under Irish law as well. This "deal" was never codified in primary or secondary legislation in Ireland. The government of famously-not-crooked-in-any-way Charlie Haughey did this deal under the table, and all subsequent administrations have been behaving like it was legal. It never was.

handelaaron Why I avoid using empty() in PHP? A Closer Look

isset($var) will return false if you have deliberately set $var === NULL

Otherwise more or less fine?

The whole OP here is a longwinded way of observing that several built-in PHP functions don't know anything about types. You can't use switch() as it's usually documented either, for example, because that ignores types too.

There are ways around all these things, of course. PHP that doesn't suck is kind of the norm these days. Just stay the hell away from Wordpress

handelaaron The data on extreme human ageing is rotten from the inside out

And John Alfred Tinniswood is in fact listed in the 1921 census, born 1912 in Manchester, a resident of Wavertree, West Derby, Liverpool, Lancs.

handelaaron Officer who ignored NYPD's 'courtesy cards' receives $175K settlement

That is nonsense. The cards have no non-corrupt reasons to exist.

handelaaron B-Trees and Database Indexes

Nor Chrome desktop

handelaaron Stripe acquires Lemon Squeezy

I mean, OK, but by the time it's called VAT in their universe they're already treating you as 'overseas' and your total payment processor fee is pushing 10% because "not in the US" apparently carries a 100% surcharge

handelaaron California approves final high-speed rail link connecting San Francisco to LA

https://archive.is/D6LT5

handelaaron EU Council has withdrawn the vote on Chat Control

That right already exists. These Acts are always struck down by the EU's Court of Justice along with all others that are in conflict with the founding legal documents of the Union.

The problem is that there isn't a mechanism to refer a proposed Act to that court before it's passed to prevent it hitting the books in the first place, and I think that's something that's easier to fix than (eg) trying to introduce new freedoms to the Bill of Rights when Hungary is able to block that.

Locally it'd be progress if member states stopped attempting to transpose new EU law when that law is clearly going to be struck down later on. National courts have that expertise but refuse to use it.

handelaaron The 40-Year-Old Cable Modem (a NABU network modem teardown) [video]

I'm not even especially hardware-y myself but am sharing this because I've been riveted for 20 minutes at the sheer joy of this video. And slightly imagining the what-if potential for this thing which was essentially shoving 6Mbps over coax in 1985, had it ever been repurposed circa 1993

handelaaron A UK college student explaining congressional procedure to Washington

It is the former. The latter is not necessary: lots of those of us with ASD don't need anything close to an idetic memory to hold insane amounts of minutiae about some random topic or other if it happens to be the topic we're deeply interested in

handelaaron Stripe live dashboard

No. It used to but they turned it off in Dec 2021; notice in my dashboard says it improved sales revenue by 0.5% but only added fraud risk by 0.0004%

handelaaron Leaving Twitter had no effect on NPR's traffic

Instead of feeling like the label was accurate (it is not), why not instead do a quick search and actually find out how much of NPR's income comes from the government?

(Spoiler: government advertising pays significantly more of the budget of a great many commercial and "independent" radio stations)

handelaaron Stream Compression in NATS

I didn't stop looking and followed link to the version announcement, then went to the front page of nats.io from the top left of that page.

And I also still have absolutely no fucking idea what any of this is.

handelaaron Meta pitches EU to charge a $10 subscription for ad-free Facebook and Instagram

Lots of people here simply thinking it's a question of whether this is something you'd buy, as if the EU regulators are going to countenance this for so much as a femtosecond.

They will not, and the implied quid-pro-quo of "extreme ongoing privacy violation is what we get for not charging people" will make them more angry, not less, and is an _extremely_ dumb idea for them to be pushing in this context because it actually cements regulators' belief that Meta has no interest whatsoever in behaving itself.

The EU is not empowered to let Meta break the law. This is NOT a thing.

handelaaron Sigh, this is what browsing the web in the EU looks like nowadays (2021)

GDPR regs in fact already require exactly this, and all "consent" acquired without one has no legal basis. One or two national regulators have belatedly started to pursue it.