leg100

It wasn't ignored by the rest of the press. Private eye was one of many outlets, an important one granted, but the story was repeatedly reported on and investigated over the years by the local papers, Computer Weekly, TheRegister, the BBC, ITV, The Guardian, etc. Indeed Nick Wallis, an independent journalist, has covered it very closely for a very long time (including a special in an issue of PE):

https://www.postofficescandal.uk/

The scandal has hit the headlines many, many times across all the outlets, particularly in 2019-21 with the litigation and appeal cases. It was the subject of an episode of BBC Panorama in 2015 (fronted by Nick Wallis).

But it all comes to nought. The victims are still out of pocket and still have criminal prosecutions. If the media are to blame, then so is the judiciary, and so is the government, who have had it in their power to provide financial redress. And of course the Post Office and Fujitsu are the culprits.

Location: Kent, UK

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Golang, Terraform, Kubernetes, GCP, Postgres.

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/louis-garman-418b95/

Email: louisgarman@gmail.com

Github: https://github.com/leg100

I'm a DevOps engineer / Golang developer, happy doing both or one or the other.

Re the video and the "paper cut" of having to look up the latest ami for cent OS: with a conventional system, would one not merely specify "latest" and it'll use the latest image, depending upon support in the API?

It uses the terraform providers under the hood. I don't know if the providers themselves are switching to the BSL license but hell, relying on Hashicorp to stick to an open source license for any of their projects is a liability from hereon in.

No, I don't see how you could arrive at that interpretation. Unless you're providing a "competitive offering" invoking terraform on Github Actions, or on any platform, or on your laptop, going by terms of their BSL that would not constitute a license violation.

Do they not autogenerate the code for their providers? A recall a big thing being made of that a while back.

I've built an open source clone* of terraform cloud. Will it contravene BSL?

1. Under the hood, it runs the terraform binary.

2. Receives API calls from the terraform binary.

3. Uses a modicum of code from the terraform cloud SDK.

I think I've answered my own question with (1), which may constitute "hosting" or "embedding" a Hashicorp product.

* https://github.com/leg100/otf

“I stress, this is the euro area. It does not change my suggestion on the role of interest rates, which are a peculiarly UK phenomenon.”

A strange remark. I understand that the ECB interest rate is a little behind the curve but I don't see how that renders "interest rates...a peculiarly UK phenomenon". They're rising everywhere, and are higher than they have been since the financial crisis, and the BoE's 5% is less than the USA and many other countries.

The housing crisis is universal. There's been growing inability to build in many countries, as the article readily admits. People can't afford homes across the world: USA, Canada, Australia, even China, where supply isn't a problem per se.

The article should then address this global phenomenon rather than conclude it is a "political problem", suggesting it is some kind of peculiar ideology exported out of Britain.

This is incorrect. This is not the first-ever strike. There were wildcat strikes across the UK last summer, more widespread than today's it would appear:

> https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252523767/UK-Amazon-work...

Media outlets routinely ignore illegal, unofficial, wildcat strikes. They are more newsworthy however, because they express genuine disillusionment amongst workers and their capability to organise themselves without union management.

Fascinating. This is a great book:

https://www.abebooks.co.uk/9780711031449/Londons-Railways-Ai...

It shows major railway stations from above. As the photos were taken long ago in the 50s and 60s they reveal how freight yards took up most of the real estate around stations. For example, Kings X had a yard extending for a large area behind it, which is now the redeveloped area, the "coal yard", etc.

By this way, goods inc meat made their deep into the heart of cities. Presumably they then made their way to market via wagons, horse and cart or motorised. Unless the rail yard was in the market like in Smithfield!

God please don't. Turning everything into a playground to tickle infantile superficial tastes: conical shaped nonsense structures covered with primary colours, meaningless naff slogan in neon "Maybe it's because", renderings showing people milling about doing bugger all.

They should have done everything possible to reverse the trend and keep it a meat market. Commerce keeps a place alive, people working and doing stuff.

> ...channeling meat trucks through the congested heart of London does seem like a habit from another era.

Why? Turning cities inside out isn't an era I'd want to live in. London should be braver rather than doing what every other city in the world is doing.

What's the issue with bog standard selects? Is it purely aesthetics, or are there accessibility problems?

> Flash stores its vector graphics in XML format. You might argue that XML is a poor choice for graphics data, but you weren't a product manager at Macromedia.

SVG would beg to differ.

> Electricity prices would still be through the roof. The prices are all set on the international markets.

Only to the extent that electricity can be imported and exported via international connectors, which are of course limited in their capacity.

Prices are not set internationally, but domestically. Energy is not a tangible, stored commodity like coal which is internationally priced.

If what you said was true then America's electricity would be priced the same as Europe's, whereas it is way cheaper.

Therefore building out additional electricity production in the UK could well lower prices, depending on matching of demand and supply, agreed prices in contracts, length of contracts, etc, and of course whether additional connectors are deployed.

How does one perform deployments with go+sqlite? With a client-server database such as postgres your app and database are on separate servers, and you can perform a blue-green, canary, etc, deployment of the app, spinning up new servers running the new version alongside the servers running the old version, before shutting down the servers running the old version.

But with sqlite you'd have to perform a hot-upgrade, surely? i.e. shut down the old version and quickly fire up the new version, with a small window of downtime in between.

Note: I see Litestream/LiteFS allows distributed deployment (both in beta).

No mention of the role and benefit of contributors to your open source project? I would have thought that is the main benefit: many hands make light work. Cathedral and the bazaar etc.

In the case of this chap sounds like it never got to that point, he was doing all the work. Seems like his impression of open source is a trade where you have a developer who displays his wares and offers them for free, and praise and donations roll in. Rather than a powerful operating model allowing software to develop that you could never hope to develop alone. Time/effort ratio is much reduced for everyone involved.

Question its viability by all means. It's a progressive and generous idea. Sad that it's not even considered in the article.

> ...equity is literally communism.

That's incorrect. The goal or schema of communism is not "equal outcomes". That might be the crude rubric of some state capitalist societies of the past, e.g. equal wages regardless of rank, but in true communism the abundance of resources permits anyone to have their needs met and for anyone to realize their full abilities.

One can criticize its naivety. But please do not conflate it with the mean and frankly misanthropic world view of the woke crowd, in which large swathes of humanity are condemned to endless self flagellation.

Don't worry, they are pretty interchangeable, depending upon context. The dictionary definitions show both can be used for the same meaning, say for equal rights and for actual equal carving out of resources and means. Or something specific in the case of finance or law. And the woke crowd evidently have their own stricter definitions of both.

I'd avoid using either in any polemic for a better world, and stick to the original words of the communist manifesto, which have not been bettered: from each according to their ability, to each according to their need!

The dollar was 87p ten days ago, it's 92p now.

It get you're quoting USDGBP but what you say doesn't make any sense to anyone not sitting at a forex desk.

I don't think Bukowski did find it easy. He's saying he could only write poetry for its own sake and for no other motivation whatsoever and reaching that point is hard and may never come but realizing this essential point saves you a lot of time and crap poetry!

I'd be careful with these ideas of countries being generally wealthy these days. Germany and the UK as with elsewhere has a large minority who could only dream of such temperatures in the middle of winter in their home. Many will go without heating as they have done in previous winters. Standard of comfort is highly variable within countries.

But yes, generally speaking, people have got used to setting the thermostat higher.

"...likely open the whole place to libel claims"

What rot. Any HN story comment is subject to "libel claims" in jurisdictions with poor free speech protections (e.g. Britain), not only "X is hiring stories".

Commentary is the night torch of liberty, shining a critical light on propaganda. YC libertarianism should be eating its own dog food

There is no average that does not hide information.

To point out the obvious, the perfect information is the underlying data. If there are 10 people in the economy then just provide those 10 data points. If there is a million people, then provide all the statistics - the averages, percentiles, etc - as well as all the data.

An article can report the averages as well as point to the underlying data set.

The idea of pronouncing one average better than all the others is moronic.

The crossrail train seats are damn hard on the bum. There is a trend with public transport upholstery to go from the spring-bedded seats of olde to a mere veneer of fabric atop some plastic. Why bother with any fabric?

I suspect the new seating is cheaper, lighter and easier to maintain, and they can cram more of them in.

That's what's pretty good about the status quo in the UK with regard to this app: as the article states, it is not legally a speed camera and can't be used for speeding fines but the police can use the uploaded evidence to prosecute dangerous driving offences.

God this is tiresome. There are so many good xkcd comic strips that could be posted with more nuance and applicability to the subject matter. But almost everytime a link to xkcd is posted, it is to #927.

It's utterly inane. Anyone who frequents HN will have seen it linked before and will know not to bother to link to it again. So why do it?

Au contraire. You'll find all sorts of people with different ideas, interests, curiosities, tastes, desires, opinions, vices and virtues; the full gamut of humanity, as you might expect in a metropolis of near 40 million.

Yes, certain traits predominate as they do in any culture but if you go looking I'm pretty sure you'll find what you're looking for in Tokyo.

Read the link again....you're not wrong:

> Pulumi doesn’t “use” Terraform under the hood at all, it uses Terraform providers in order to map the cloud provider API surface.

Which is a real devious piece of sophistry.

The Hashicorp co-founders considered alternative approaches when originally designing terraform. The actor model was considered but dismissed. That's not a million miles away from the kubernetes reconcile loop model:

> Then we transitioned to an actor-based model where each resource was almost an actor, and there was a message-passing interface between them.

> This allowed the system to be highly concurrent the way Terraform is today, but also confusing for users to deal with and very difficult to build a programming model around, because the ordering of execution was so random and everything was happening concurrently.

https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/terraform-fireside-chat-...

They may still be right. Kubernetes' approach may seem more attractive but terraform is far more pragmatic in its design.