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ninalanyon

1,396 karma · joined September 19, 2024

In the unlikely event that you want to contact me you can do so at ninalanyon@gmail.com.
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ninalanyon··on Denmark Data Breach Exposes 8.8M People's Personal Data
Perhaps one of the steps to a high trust culture is actually trusting people.
ninalanyon··on Denmark Data Breach Exposes 8.8M People's Personal Data
When you do this the owner of the car is notified. And there is an audit trail because you do it by sending a text to a premium number.

The debt information is there so that when the owner sells the car the buyer can check to see if they actually really do own it outright.

ninalanyon··on Denmark Data Breach Exposes 8.8M People's Personal Data
Not in my, admittedly limited, experience. I've stayed in hotels in at least a dozen countries and under half of them wanted my passport. In the UK it's usually enough to just say my name to the receptionist, they confirm how long I'm staying, ask me to sign a form and tell them my car registration number and then they hand me the key. Quite often there isn't even a form to sign, just a terminal to enter my car registration number to avoid parking fees.

I was asked for my passport in a Premier Inn this summer because they thought I was a foreigner but when I pointed out that I was a UK citizen they dropped the requirement.

In Europe it was mostly Italy and Poland that wanted to see my passport.

ninalanyon··on Denmark Data Breach Exposes 8.8M People's Personal Data
> I hope this will be eye opening to the responsible people.

Don't hold your breath.

ninalanyon··on The evolution of effective altruism
> at this point does anyone really give a shit what consenting adults do in their private lives?

Perhaps people in your circle are above that. But you don't have to cast your net very wide to find someone who thinks that same sex relationships are an abomination.

> big pearl clutch on X about some other conservative being into consensual non-monagamy, and the collective response from everyone from all political stripes was a giant shrug.

Twitter was not representative of everyone and X is even less so.

ninalanyon··on Show HN: Glashütte Trash Clock – A 30-minute pendulum clock made from trash
I think he has slightly misunderstood, or at least misstated, the physics:

> a pendulum oscillates is only determined by its length (and the strength of gravity), while the weight at the end of the pendulum’s rod (which clockmakers call a bob) doesn’t really matter.

This not correct. The period is determined by the distance from the fulcrum to the centre of mass. The position of the bob does matter. On my grandfather clock there is a small screw that adjusts the position of the bob and hence the length of the pendulum so that you can regulate the clock.

ninalanyon··on Show HN: Glashütte Trash Clock – A 30-minute pendulum clock made from trash
They all say Live stream offline.
ninalanyon··on A map of every lighthouse
Mostly not lighthouses but navigation lights.
ninalanyon··on We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything
> Whereas traffic spikes to websites are not.

But it would be trivial for the platform to rate limit traffic.

ninalanyon··on UK Government Body Kept Files on People Criticizing Prevent Program
Is anyone surprised?
ninalanyon··on On social reality in China
> wealth was heavily concentrated with the rich and powerful,

It still is.

ninalanyon··on Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?
Transformers are pretty simple machines, no moving parts so there aren't all that many complicated bits except in the tap changer. But what is there has to be just right and a lot of the critical details are made of paper.

But of course many such transformers are connected to equally old generators and they are a bit more challenging as far as making replacement parts is concerned, huge turbines for instance.

ninalanyon··on Suits Are Better Tech Than Modern Clothes
What's stopping you? I know it might seem a flippant question but I mean it seriously.

Such clothing, or at least a plausible copy, would be much cheaper now than it was then. I don't do the kingly robe thing but I do wear colourful clothes almost every day and people love it. I was stopped in the street yesterday by a woman who wanted to take my picture.

ninalanyon··on Suits Are Better Tech Than Modern Clothes
Linen has to be worn a lot to become flexible over time.
ninalanyon··on Suits Are Better Tech Than Modern Clothes
> When a suit is your daily driver, you'll get it tailored and set up correctly.

How far back in time do you have to go for that to be generally true? I'm 70 from South West England and I hardly know anyone who had a tailored suit, almost everyone just bought them off the peg even when I was very young. Even fifty years ago wearing an actual suit to work where I lived was relatively rare too even for people who were more than a generation older; it was something that only people in a few professions did (lawyers, estate agents, some doctors, some academics, etc.).

ninalanyon··on Fuck Android Developer Verification Program
Can PWAs operate with local data? Can they interact with data from anywhere in the file system?
ninalanyon··on Singapore govt dating app uses Gale-Shapley stable marriage algorithm
LOL.

Just in case you were serious I think they meant clubs like a sewing circle, crown green bowling, tennis, the local brass band, civic action groups, etc. In other words associations of one kind or another, in tech. terms special interest groups.

ninalanyon··on Why Is Sam Altman a Free Man?
That reminds me of Kernighan's law: "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place."

Which leads to this:

"If you write code at the limit of your intelligence, you won’t be able to understand or troubleshoot it later."

https://lawsofsoftwareengineering.com/laws/kernighans-law/

ninalanyon··on September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy
GDP is irrelevant when discussing the well being of the ordinary person. A more relevant measure would be median income together with purchasing power parity.

US median income is just over 19 k international dollars, Poland is just under 9 k. Still a big difference but just over a factor of 2 instead of over 3.5.

See https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...

ninalanyon··on September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy
> Every generation believes it is living through the end of something.

I'm not sure my generation thought that (I was born in 1955). Not in the South of England at least. Growing up there in the late fifties, sixties, seventies, I feel that most of us were looking forward most of the time and anticipating good times. At least most people I knew at the time. It was a time of accelerating change and a great deal of it was undeniably positive.

ninalanyon··on California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops
Is that really HR or a reflection of the social environment in your specific country. I never found HR to be a problem in Norway.
ninalanyon··on Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?
Electricity distribution, mainly transformers from 10 kVA to 500 MVA and more.

It takes a long time to design and a lot of material to make a big transformer and they last for decades. They are critical infrastructure so when one fails you want it replaced or repaired quickly but they are too expensive (millions of dollars/pounds/euros) to keep a spare unit idle for decades and the lead time for a new large power transformer might be six months or even longer. So repair makes sense, especially if it can be done on site because moving a big metal box full of oil, steel, and copper that weighs hundreds of tonnes is a major logistical exercise.

This isn't something that can be done by a company that 'moves fast and breaks things' and disappears next year.

ninalanyon··on Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?
Make sure that you have as thorough a specification of what the system is supposed to do as you can.

Then define the version control system and the build process, specifying the dependencies, and so on.

Think about any opaque blobs in the system and try to eliminate them so that you have plain text source code so that no tools are needed to read the code.

Make sure that the build process runs entirely locally and never fetches anything from outside.

Simplify everything, use only tools and languages that are well understood and supported.

The real problems are not strictly technical but social: how do you prevent loss of the code, the tools, the specification, how do you maintain the expertise needed to maintain it. How do you ensure that all those things that are obvious to you now are written down in all their gory detail so that your great grandchildren will not apply their new and different preconceived ideas to the system?

Document all this on paper as well as electronic storage, make sure that version ids are recorded on every page as well as being available to the user of the machine or program.

In the industry in which I worked for the last thirty years of my career it was not uncommon to have things come back for repair after fifty years use and to be able to consult the original drawings and bill of materials so that exact replacement parts could be made.

ninalanyon··on Jury finds Facebook liable for deceiving users in Cambridge Analytica case
> include jail time for the decision makers

This is much more important than the fines. But really it should be widened to include not only those who made the decision but also those who implemented it (software developers, designers, project managers) and those who benefited from it (executive officers, shareholders).

Anyone involved with the company who knew what was going on and did nothing to hinder it is culpable to some degree.

ninalanyon··on One Piece of Flock Camera Data Put This Innocent Woman in Jail for 13 Days
> , if she had a career that's probably hosed

Why? She hasn't committed a crime so why should her career be damaged?

ninalanyon··on One Piece of Flock Camera Data Put This Innocent Woman in Jail for 13 Days
As far as reasoning abilities goes it would seem so.
ninalanyon··on Singapore’s National Library Board offers micropayments to build reading habits
What does handwriting have to do with fonts?
ninalanyon··on Tutoring company tells parents to save their money and 'use AI instead'
That was my point. The idea of replacing teachers with AI is itself dystopian and and I'm quite sure rife with unintended consequences.
ninalanyon··on Tutoring company tells parents to save their money and 'use AI instead'
That would depend on which country I was in. Where I live it would probably be at least 20 USD per hour. But I live in a country (Norway) where unemployment benefits and protections against becoming unemployed in the first place are strong.
ninalanyon··on The Test
Oh, I agree with you.

I was just wondering about the motivation of the professor in question and whether they had really properly thought through what they were doing and the effects it might have together with whether any effort was being made to rectify the state of the education system that caused the problem.

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