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jjp

1,722 karma · joined January 3, 2013

Used to program mainframes, then I architected solutions, now I manage products for a large corporate. Hobby sites of climatespy.com and fuelNow.co.uk
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jjp··on I accidentally turned LLM memory into program analysis
Interesting and potentially has applicability in deriving logical rules from regulation, contracts etc. Are there already formal languages that can be used to codify, that sort of information.
jjp··on Ask HN: How do you keep up with HN these days?
RSS to only see new links that hit 100 points https://hnrss.org/newest?points=100. And then selective reading of those.
jjp··on libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months
Baulk - refuse to comply
jjp··on Blasted at 20x force of gravity: what ejection from fighter jet does to the body
Blasted out at 20 times the force of gravity: what ejection from a fighter jet does to the body
jjp··on I made 20 GDPR deletion requests. 12 were ignored
Or perhaps they want to stop any company that doesn’t want to play by the rules as defined by the laws of society. So doesn’t matter whether it’s a US hyperscaler or an EU wanna be.
jjp··on A macOS app that blurs your screen when you slouch
Walking the dog is my go to for thinking through problems. The dog really loves the hard problems as they get a longer walk.
jjp··on Influencers and OnlyFans models are dominating U.S. O-1 visa requests
Is the influencer career being short lived any different from an athlete
jjp··on Ask HN: My AI app builder has users, not buyers – why?
Is the user base churning or are you getting multi day active users? Which one will point you in a different direction.

Once the page has been generated where can I host it? The answer will influence your target audience.

And then on pricing what does a credit get me in terms of something tangible - a page, 5 pages?

And for the target audience do they know which model is better? And if so why is it better to use your site than just direct prompt?

jjp··on Why Software Systems Must Default to the Metric System
If globally we collectively used metric for all units then this becomes realistic. But whilst we have different units being used and a person needs to view this is going to happen.

If the output of a sensor that records in metric, then needs to be viewed in imperial it needs to be converted. Is it better to convert at write or read time always depends on use case and geography. Or do we just force the human in the loop to know that the speed limit is 112km/h even though it’s non digitally signposted at 70.

jjp··on Apple will phase out Rosetta 2 in macOS 28
“Those systems will continue to receive security updates for 3 years.” - looks like 8 years in total.
jjp··on Tell HN: Azure outage
Whilst the status message acknowledge's the issue with Front Door (AFD), it seems as though the rest of the actions are about how to get Portal/internal services working without relying on AFD. For those of us using Front Door does that mean we're in for a long haul?
jjp··on A 132-Year-Old Message in a Bottle in a Scottish Lighthouse
BBC report including text of letter https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cje0x5j7wgjo
jjp··on Ask HN: How do you structure your shared finances with your spouse/partner
Joint account for everything for the house and family. Both salaries get paid into it, in full. Spend is jointly agreed.

We then both have an individual account for our monthly allowance. Monthly allowance is funded from combined account, and is same amount for us both. Our allowance funds personal items and hobbies.

jjp··on Flags Are Not Languages
It's also terribly annoying when I've found a page through a search engine and the site decides that I don't want that language. Navigates me to the language of my accept-language, decides that's on a different domain which is managed by a different team/CMS and doesn't have or can't find the page I was looking for in the first place.
jjp··on GraphCast: AI model for weather forecasting
Are you thinking something like https://www.forecastadvisor.com/?
jjp··on Got called to a professor’s office after a complaint his SPARC4 was running slow
Had exactly the same with a bunch of developers who could change the queue priority on a mainframe for their own work. They couldn't work out for themselves that if everybody set their work to the highest priority it had no benefit to any of them. Trying to educate them failed, so we revoked access.
jjp··on A group of college students send a rover the size of a shoebox to the moon
Project Website - https://irislunarrover.space/
jjp··on UK’s Power Switch-Off Shows Future for Cleaner Energy Grid
Probably not, but right now that small inconvenience is financially noticeable. We've (2 adults, 2 teenagers) made an effort in the last 6 months to reduce our base load, result is that our December 2022 electricity usage was 75% of December 2021 - for the same house, same occupancy, same demand (light, cooking, washing/drying, showers, household tech but not space heating or other hot water).

If we go to bed and the house is using > 200watts, then something has not been turned off. Turning off our TV and the associated devices for 20 hours hours per day adds up to a nice meal out for one person each month.

jjp··on Ask HN: What are you working on this year?
I'm going to be working on a personal itch problem. I first spotted the problem about 20 years ago. I solved it as a brute force manual screen scrape 15 and 10 years ago. I tried to solve it programatically 5 years ago, learnt lots but ultimately went round in circles on scaling an approach.

I'm now excited to be playing with Arquero [1] and Uber H3 [2] and hopefully I'll scratch the itch and release something!

[1] https://uwdata.github.io/arquero/ [2] https://github.com/uber/h3-js

jjp··on Random ScotRail Apology Generator
I wonder how much of the message is for train and station staff, like Inspector Sands, as much as for passengers.
jjp··on Random ScotRail Apology Generator
Some back story and previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32536808
jjp··on Humans can't endure temperatures and humidities as high as previously thought
Yes, plenty of research that analyzes the impact of your environment (not just temperature) on productivity. I read an earlier editiion of -https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279190533_Creating_... it was fascinating.
jjp··on Ask HN: How do I learn real-world COBOL?
https://old.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/g5zvpa/ps... - is probably the most succinct from that thread. Your challenge isn't just learning Cobol - that's relatively simple. It's all the surrounding infrastructure that is also very different - different OS, different file system, different database, front-end is 80x24 green and then you get into source control, build and devops which will all be different.
jjp··on Ask HN: Why is the source folder called 'src'?
Shortening was probably driven by storage constraints - 3 bytes saved multiplied out by a few hundred references becomes a real saving on a 1.2Mb floppy disk.
jjp··on How downtime insurance became a thing
As it seems to be the client and not the provider that is insured, be interesting to understand how they price the risk and whether it's on all providers.

Also I wonder whether they do anything with the providers to reduce the risk, and therefore reduce claims.

jjp··on Personal Stories about the TRS-80
We had one at home from early 1980's. It was bought by my dad's business, it came home weekends and he taught himself to program. He used to create job schedules and pricing estimates and I got to do the data entry!

Dad seriously considered changing career (from electrical engineering), but mom couldn't be convinced that it would pay! Dad stayed in electrical engineering and did alright. But it got me into computers - copying programs onto TRS-80 and then Apple II with CP/M and dbase.

jjp··on 'Dutch reach' rule change to Highway Code welcomed
Dutch reach is one of many recommended behavioural changes - https://www.gov.uk/government/news/the-highway-code-8-change...
jjp··on Chromium team to allow organisations to block access to View Source
Discussion from a couple of days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29170886
jjp··on Wooden bird bought for £75 revealed to be Anne Boleyn’s
BBC news reports that the auction was the estate of a deceased antique dealer.
jjp··on Potato Toys (1931)
Many more images - https://www.puppiesandflowers.com/toys-of-potatoes/#Toys%20o...
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