jonp888

For some reason the HN commentariat is very pro-nuclear, and it drives them INSANE that the shutdown had minimal consequences(as only a small proportion of power production was nuclear and it was entirely replaced by new renewable capacity).

So now have to be worried that I'm going to killed by an AI designed nerve agent that someone has cooked up in their shed?

FFS. I hate this world so much. I wish I could just flip a switch and never have to hear about or have anything to do with AI ever again.

Do you ever stop to think about the horrific dystopia you and your acolytes are creating?

Ironically probably one of my biggest reasons against buying one is it's obvious desirability.

I've already once in my life been in a situation where I can say with certainty the only reason my laptop wasn't stolen is that it wasn't a MacBook(despite having equal or above retail purchase value). I wouldn't be surprised if there's more that I never knew about.

"the solid base of electricity generation disappeared and thus the trust in electricity for transport disappeared"

I'm sorry, but WTF?

This is the most unhinged drivel about German nuclear I have ever read on HN, and that's saying something.

There no problem with "trust in electricity", whatsoever, nor is there any lack of a "solid base". There has been no electricity grid collapse in Germany for decades(in stark contrast to the US, or f.e. Spain). Any problems with electrcity have been due to terrorism or building errors.

Even with that, in case you haven't noticed, EV cars run on batteries and don't need constant power. Perhaps for "preppers" or people living in remote areas it would be a factor, but I have never in my life heard anyone connect the use of EV power with the power station the charging comes from or how reliable the grid is.

If you plough through the first pages so far as I can tell it seems like actually it won't be removed.

Certainly not FPC, because the hard dependency on GTK2 was a misunderstanding.

For Lazarus it seems like dependency on GTK2 is considered a bug and not a fundamental incompatibility, because there are too many GTK2 applications to completely remove it from Debian.

For many years the Spanish state-owned company RENFE had a monopoly on Spain's huge high speed rail network. However their high prices, inconvenient schedules and poor customer service were often criticized, and so when, to the annoyance of RENFE and many spanish politicians, additional foreign operators entered the market on the key Madrid - Barcelona route, ridership doubled whilst ticket prices halved.

So I would standby for this tragedy to be used for political purposes to try and get foreign operators banned from Spanish tracks, regardless of the facts of the matter.

The British rail system releases as open data(JSON over AMQP) all train movements down to indidvidual signal blocks You can view some of the the live maps here: https://www.opentraintimes.com/maps, but this is unique as far as I know.

I don't think it's really down to super-tight security as such, rather that there's no reason to release the data publically.

Ships and airplanes broadcast data because it's useful for collision avoidance and tracking. The international maritime and aerospace system is far too complicated and large that you could ever build a private network of every ship or plane operator sharing encrypted data, or that one company could set up receivers for the tracking data worldwide. A closed system wouldn't work.

Rail is both physically and legally a finite closed space. The network operator knows definitively where every train in their network is because they have sensors in the tracks. The network is responsible for preventing collisions, not the individual trains. They have contracts with every company which operates on their tracks and if these need their internal data they can get it. So there's simply no good reason why trains should be publically broadcasting their information, or why network operators would want to expose all their internal data.

And against the no positives there are negative sides - apart from a couple of famous cases I've not heard of it in Europe, but stealing from cargo trains seems to be big business in the US: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-11-17/los-ange...

In the UK the open tracking data also brought complaints from freight companies who feared competitors would use it to analyse their movements, figure out which traffic flows were the most profitable and use it for commercial advantage.

The determinant is the amount of money invested in infrastructure.

No matter whether the train operators and the network operator are private or a state monopoly, all decisions about major upgrades and new lines are made and funded by the government. The network operator just deals with the maintenance.

Nationalisation(or sometimes privatisation!) is seemingly seen by many as panacea, but it won't help you if your network runs at 150% capacity every day.

Sometimes it's because you need to support ancient esoteric hardware that's not supported by any other tools, or because you've built so much of your own tooling around a particular tool that it resembles application platform in it's own right.

Other times it's just because there are lots of other teams involved in validation, architecture, requirements and document management and for everyone except the developers, changing anything about your process is extra work for no benefit.

At one time I worked on a project with two compiler suites, two build systems, two source control systems and two CI systems all operating in parallel. In each case there was "officially approved safe system" and the "system we can actually get something done with".

We eventually got rid of the duplicate source control, but only because the central IT who hosted it declared it EOL and thus the non-development were forced, kicking and screaming to accept the the system the developers had been using unofficially for years.

There's the police and the criminal justice system for that.

I suggest you post your e-mail login details and here and a dump of the contents of your phone, then all of HN can all check through and see what crimes you're guilty of.

I'm sure you'll say you haven't committed any crimes, but why should we be expected to believe you if you don't share all your information with the world?

This system works by launching an official Windows image in Docker and then making an RDP connection to it. There are a couple of others too now like WinBoat

What all of them avoid mentioning is that the images were intended by Microsoft for test and development purposes on Windows and the license clearly states you need a valid Windows license to use them: https://hub.docker.com/r/microsoft/windows#license

I wonder if Microsoft will take some action to enforce this if these projects become popular.

Edit: This comment is incorrect, see below comment from doctorpangloss

There's plenty of semi-technical tinkerers out there, doing things like building flight sim cockpits, scraping by on copying ready made code, doing minimal changes and asking forums or LLMs if they get stuck.

They just want something that works, and ideally to keep using the same thing they've always used. They know what Arduino is, as long as it does the job they aren't interested in researching alternatives. They don't want to get involved in adapting someone's instructions for a different pin layout, or risk that anything they've done up to now stops working.

Yes, we all know it's a massively out of date platform easily outclassed by much cheaper and more flexible solutions, and if you must use the Arduino IDE it can build code for all sorts of boards. But for non-technical people by far the most important factor is to stick with something safe and known.

It was trains from Hamburg to Copenhagen used to run on the Fehmarn Ferry until the line was shut for reconstruction, they now run via Padborg.

The Snalltaget sleeper train from Berlin to Malmo used to run on the ferry from Sassnitz to Trelleborg avoiding Denmark altogether, that stopped because the ferries don't run on that route any more, and the train also runs via Padborg.

The EU Commission is a group of permanent employees who sit in an office and write reports, administer projects and draft legislation. They have no voting rights. They are organised into departments, each headed by a politically appointed Commissioner.

Your country has an identical group of people with a similar role who you also do not vote for, organised in just the same way.

For some reason it's only "undemocratic" when the EU does it, even though literally every country in the world has some kind of permanent establishment of administrators and no country could function without them.

Every country in the world has a "Commission". It's no different to the UK Civil Service or the various US Federal Governments. If it didn't exist then the EU would be unable to implement any of it's policies.

Can you explain how MEP's directly proposing laws would affect this? I really don't get it. In parliamentary systems it's normal that virtually all legislation originates in the executive. In the British parliament at least, that a law is privately proposed and then becomes law is rare and normally restricted to very simple legislation on specific issues.

Would it really?

France has the lowest retirement age of any EU country, the second highest expenditure on social benefits, and a large debt burden.

Raising the retirement age by a couple of years is obviously unpopular, yet arguably sensible - but trying to do that was what caused the last set of violent protests.

I do wonder what the French population actually want as a solution to the unsustainable debt and huge proportion of tax revenue(second highest in the EU) spent on social benefits.

Clearly they recognise a need for reform because they vote for politicians who run on a reform platform. Yet as soon as said reformer tries to change anything at all, it's back to the barricades.

Reduce benefits? Riot!

Increase tax rates? Riot!

Extend the retirement age? Riot!

Increase immigration? Riot!

Probably their situation is similar to mine.

It's mandatory, on the orders of a senior manager who has no background in software development, for all developers in my department to have a Copilot subscription. I've never used it for anything, and I imagine it's the same for most of my colleagues(we do highly specialised embedded development with in-house custom everything - compiler, standard library, operating system, hardware), and it seems no-one is interested in whether it's used or not.

Consequently Microsoft is being paid $240 a year per person to do nothing whatsoever, which is surely a great business for them.

It has. At one point HardKernel "found" some Broadcom chips and made a one-off unauthorized batch of the Pi-compatible Odroid-W. Rpi weren't amused :)

Nodejs itself is, but when you install a node project manually, you type npm install and wait while it downloads the 500 different packages it depends on.

Debian follows the same philosophy as for other more traditional languages and expects that all these dependencies are packaged as individual Debian packages.

I use WetterOnline, it's German but I think it covers all of Europe.

Alternatives to Couchsurfing.com such as BeWelcome and WarmShowers have been around for many years, decades even and have users counts into 6 figures. They've remained non-corporate but never managed to reach mainstream popularity like Couchsurfing.com did.

What are you hoping to achieve by launching another hospitality sharing site that the other established non-profit sites couldn't?

Analysed logically the aim of your post was a positive message that pushes back against "doomers", yet somehow it left me more depressed about the utter futility and meaningless of existence than any other comment I've read so far.

That's quite strange. Unlike in say France or Spain, all domestic trains in Germany should be reservation free for all Interrail ticket holders, including the fastest ICE trains.

The whole point of Markdown is that the formatting codes intutitively make sense and are readable even without a viewer and without needing to read a specification first. People have been using asterisks as bullet points and to emphasise things long before anyone came up with Markdown.

Maybe it doesn't to you, but it does to most people.

An update to Microsoft Notepad which renders Markdown is currently being rolled out: https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2025/05/30/text-fo...

That's usually illegal, unless you're a genuine independent contractor that completes work packages for multiple clients.

If it was legal to work in the office of your only "client" 40 hours a week on a permanent basis, then any EU company could ignore the entire employment legislation of their real country by setting up a shell subsidiary in the US.

1) Hydrogen combustion engines exist, but are extremely inefficent. For this reason all Hydrogen buses currently in use use fuel cells, which are expensive and complicated. That you were unaware of this makes me doubt the rest of your commentary.

2) There is a huge existing logistics network which conveys diesel to all corners of the world. The same, in a sense for electricity. For Hydrogen this doesn't exist.

5) The chairman of JCB wrote to all his employees before the Brexit referendum to say how he was absolutely convinced it would be a brilliant success and would lead to great prosperity for Britain. So probably not the best people to take strategy advice from.

In Europe at least, battery powered trains and commercial vehicles have been in use for decades simply because they were the best solution for certain use cases, before anyone thought about the climate or subsidies related to it. Hydrogen only came along once subsidies did.

In every single case I am aware in my country Hydrogen vehicles were only purchased because politicians insisted that Hydrogen MUST be used, and these projects have pretty much all been disastrous.

Recent in my city a number of diesel trains were replaced with battery and hydrogen. The Hydrogen trains lasted two weeks before they gave up and went back to Diesel. The battery ones are running perfectly.

Rolls Royce is also responsible for building and maintaining the nuclear reactors used in Britain's missile launch submarines.

If things really got so bad that American investors began intentionally sabotaging the operations of foreign companies, it would probably be forcibly nationalised by the British Government.

Yes, indeed, I haven't the slightest clue what neo-conservatism is. Thankyou for your informative comment.

Eliminating foreign aid seems to be a common cause of neo-conservative movements.

Boris Johnson shut down the British equivalent(Department for International Development) and scrapped the commitment to spend 0.7% of GDP on aid.

It's simplistic, drastic and brings no specific domestic effect which could be a rallying point for unrest.

It's also very easy to come up with rage bait stories of corruption and waste as justification, because in any organisation spending billions of dollars around the world you will always be to find something ridiculous that got funding, even though the proportion of the budget it represents is insignificant.