plug

Thinking about it I'm not that surprised - the population is very small, and most people can/do avail of free third-level education.

That said, I'm Irish and therefore totally biased toward Stripe for that reason alone. As if their stellar tooling and the friendly, truly excellent customer and tech support I've experienced from them so far isn't enough :)

Yeah, I'm developing a new product at the moment - I surveyed a bunch of end-users and a LOT of them had PayPal accounts - so Braintree's PayPal integration is a compelling feature to me. That said, here in Europe, Stripe's fees are better than Braintree's, and PayPal's Eurozone fees are quite eye-watering.

You'll be glad to hear that they've finally been removed since PHP 7.0 so slowly but surely they're being consigned to history.

And there seems to be much better awareness about the perils of mysql_* functions amongst PHP devs these days.

However, 5.6 is still in security support until 31st December 2018, so all that bad advice on SO and elsewhere is still relevant and lurking, waiting to be found by inexperienced devs.

That article was posted on April 1st 2011...

Indeed. I heard some of the Somme Commemoration on the radio the other day, and I was moved deeply by Charles Dance's recital of Siegfried Sassoon's "Aftermath"[1]

> Do you ever stop and ask, 'Is it all going to happen again?'

It's impossible to imagine the horror - even pondering the numbers of fallen in the first day throttles the imagination, let alone the horrific ways in which these men were murdered in swathes.

All the more tragic that many of these young men left their homes to see the world and experience the adventure of war. They had no idea what was in store for them.

[1]: http://www.potw.org/archive/potw160.html

What a funny coincidence - I just discovered and used this a few hours ago. I wanted to rip some YT audio from (mostly) old records that I have that are not on Spotify etc.

I looked at some browser plugins but I wasn't really impressed. This, on the other hand, was a great discovery. Really configurable and well documented.

Assuming you have `ffmpeg` installed just run:

`youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 $URL`

and you're done! I expect my phone will be packed of bizarre prog/jazz before the end of the weekend :D

Thanks, looks like it's back up now. Google didn't appear to have a cached copy; it kept giving me a 503.

Anecdote warning, but this feels very common to me in "Hibernio-English" as well. I do it a lot when a simple yes/no would suffice, and I notice other people doing the same. I assume it's a construct that translated over from Irish. I must start listening out for native English speakers of different nationalities for comparison :)

The first thing I did when I arrived on this page was do a page search for 'fractal'. There's always one.

"Very disappointing for a machine which isn't 3 years old". This really resonates with me, sitting at a similarly aged iMac that frequently displays bafflingly poor performance, displaying what I like to call the "psychedelic jelly-tot of death".

Sort of off-topic, but another thing that really frustrates me with Apple products is when something goes wrong with the hardware. I have a 3+ year old Macbook Air. The 't' key - specifically the little contact button under the key - stopped working consistently. Very frustrating when you start to realise just how much 't' shows up in the English language.

Anyway, I made some calls enquiring about how much a repair would cost: around €300. They just replace the entire aluminium top plate because it's impossible to replace a single contact button, and unfeasible to replace the whole keyboard array - this involves complete disassembly, and a bunch of other delicate steps, which look incredibly daunting.

I know that this is probably the trade-off for having such a small form factor, but between this, a defective SSD, a locked-in battery and periodically replacing chargers at €80 a pop, I am distinctly less enthusiastic about purchasing Apple products in the future.

Sign our guestbook! :D

Haha. This really reminds me of the very first webpage I ever made, in... 2000 I think? I created a series of images of a lens flare turning a magenta background into a white flash, turned it into an animated gif and used that as the background tile. Eye-watering stuff. I knew I'd finally found what I wanted to do :P

Ha, I love this so much. You'd be quite thirsty after a walk like that - good thing there are plenty of pubs on Baggot Street :)

The dollar sign usually only bothers me after I've gone away and written a little Python. Actually, has anyone ever tried a 'CoffeeScript for PHP' that removed the dollar sign, replaced the `->` with dot syntax, and smoothed over the various other syntax features that people complain about? Not that I'd think there'd be much point really, apart from being a fun project.

Good points. I wonder if the two World Wars are outliers though. I don't know if there was anything comparable before them before - there really hasn't been anything since. Of course the ability to rain thousands of tons of bombs on cities in WWII was due to technological advancement at that time. Thank goodness at least that technology has advanced beyond those horrors.

Exactly this. I worked in Apple's EMEIA HQ for about 11-12 months. Actually I started about a week before Steve Jobs died, and honestly, nobody on the floor seemed to care that much.

As for my own experience, I moved from a comfortable telecommute job with an amazing team, naively expecting that Apple would be a huge leap in my career experience.

Instead I found a huge factory sized cube farm (office space!) and a beleaguered internal dev team, whose job was to maintain a giant mountain of bockety legacy ball of tcsh/php/mysql. Project management and infrastructure were pretty much nil. Training and documentation didn't exist, it was sink or swim.

There was a bit of a siege mentality in the team because a lot of what they maintained was critical to a lot of people onsite, and these people frequently beat a path to your desk to berate you because 'the site was down'. Which site? There were countless report sites and webpages scattered around the place. There wasn't much time to go back and fix old code because the work pipeline was always gushing forth new work.

One feature of the job was endless, pointless meetings - these happened a lot, and it gave an glimpse into how some management types played the ladder-climbing game. I definitely came across some predatory/aggressive types. This seemed to be a good strategy because it equalled "visibility", which was often lauded as a career-making goal to aim for in the team and the company. A lot of things seemed to be done with the hope that it would "create visibility".

To be fair, I gather that things in that team are a bit better now - there were some bright, really hard guys there, working against ridiculous odds. But I cannot say I found the experience enriching - I found that I was using less of my skill-set, I hated the cube-farm corporate environment, so I took another opportunity as soon as it came along.

I'm not convinced that high tech war machinery precludes collateral damage - to use that stomach-churning phrase.

I appreciate your point on one hand - conventional weapons can be inaccurate and that can result in tragic, horrifying mistakes.

But, I'm not aware of any high tech war technology that explicitly tries to prevent risk of injury to non-combatants. The only thing that stops civilians from being fired on is the person on the other end with their finger on the trigger.

For example, in spite of the technology at hand, drone operators have made decisions based on misinformation or misinterpretation - resulting in the horrific murder of civilians.

A weapon is a weapon, and it can be easily used negligently - or malevolently. The Uragan example you mentioned is at least one of these.

Great to see Heaney mentioned by several people here! Recently voted Ireland's favourite poet of the last 100 years. This poem is a great example of his talent to document the small but evocative, quintessential elements of Irish experience. I'm having some wonderful childhood flashbacks of days on the bog right now :)

Thanks for your answer. Maybe my use of the word repercussions was a bit strong - I don't know much about attitudes there and I am asking out of curiosity, not as a challenge etc. In any case, it sounds like the general population are empathetic, and there would be little or no prejudice from your peers etc. These are small, but good things. So... if there were no risks of collaboration for Gazans, I assume there would be a lot more positive interaction between everyone?

I think your desire to participate is commendable. I don't know anything about the safety risks of collaboration to Gazans, it's very sad situation and I appreciate that it's very complex and possibly dangerous. I'd certainly be interested to learn more.

Otherwise, I'd imagine (possibly naively) that remote mentoring would be something good.

If it were possible for you to participate - would you risk repercussions for collaborating from other Israelis?

I'm not sure that worked quite as well for Dart though.

Bit off-topic but that pleasing musical sound when you hit the space bar is really like the first note in Aphex Twin's "PAPAT4 (Pineal Mix)" :)

Your settings are showing... Don't forget to change your secret key if this is the one you've deployed:

https://github.com/johndavidback/can-i-wear-shorts/blob/mast...

Neat site though :) You could "maybe" wear shorts here (Cork, Ireland) today, it's not warm but sunny. A Celsius option would be nice btw

I think this is the nail on the head for me.

I came to the conclusion late last year that I was spending too much time reading social, news and commentary - getting really sucked in. It was a massive waste of time, a productivity killer, and often quite depressing.

For instance, I live in a country where the police have no guns, and gun crime is almost non-existent. And yet, I felt like I was constantly reading about police shootings and brutality, (primarily from the U.S). And... it started to really upset me. This news has no context in my existence at all, and yet I know about it in great detail.

Same goes for all the Twitter flaming, and all sorts of other stuff.

I realised it was actually making me very unhappy. I decided to see if I could take a step back - I deleted my Facebook and Twitter, and tried to avoid comments and most extraneous news. I expected I'd go a bit mad, but the opposite happened - I'm actually surprised at just how happier I am now. Ignorance is bliss?

That said, I do believe there is huge value in being informed - but it is hard to regulate and parse all the information out there into something meaningful.

HN is my only vice now - I'm a lurker mostly, and it's work related so that's okay, right? ;)

Me neither, I'd be interested to hear more. I understand that 25 years is their lifespan. There was an interesting HN submission recently that discussed the problem of what to do with the blades once they reach EOL. Obviously they are very large and very hard to recycle due to the materials they are made from - a problem that increases with scale of course.

Like everything, I'm sure turbine blade tech will iterate. I recall hearing once that solar panels weren't viable because they didn't last long enough to recoup the energy cost it took to build them. I don't believe this is the case any more though?

Interesting. Would that depend on how close you were to the source?

Either way, I assume - crucially for the shop owner - most backed-up, drunken revellers would be unaware of this :)

A present-day Irish solution to "al-fresco urination": electrify your shop front.

http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/shops-shock-and-awe-pla...

I just looked it up on YouTube. There's a great video showing the guts of one here[0]. I concur, pretty mind blowing. So many tubes!

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BNvemnifWc

Weird. I was only looking at the Balanced site for the first time yesterday, researching payment services that offer ACH. I understand Stripe has an ACH implementation in private beta though?

Greetings from a fellow "Limerician" btw :)