Hacker News Reader

rupertjon B.C. introduces law to require cars, trucks sold by 2040 be zero emission

You'd need 6 AA batteries to deliver the same voltage as one of those RC car packs and give a direct comparison.

They were typically 6x sub-C cells, with a capacity of 1000mAh. (I remember paying extra for a 1300mAh pack!). You can get 5000mAh cells today, so it's a 5x improvement.

rupertjon Netflix is moving television beyond time-slots and national markets

Breaking Bad was (and still is) on Netflix in the UK at least.

rupertjon Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

HHVM never really took off in the PHP community. These days regular PHP performs as well, and has adopted most of the additions HHVM made to the language. Larger projects like Symfony dropped support for HHVM a while ago. It’s main purpose these days seems to be a thing to run Hack (the langauage) on.

rupertjon The US is the most expensive nation in which to have a baby

UK taxpayer here. We get sent an annual summary of the tax we paid and what it paid for. It looks like this: http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02871/taxtable1_...

rupertjon Ask HN: We didn't get a single person to pay for our SAAS – what could be wrong?

Your message is bad. It starts “Become a PROFESSIONAL freelancer”.

Your target market is freelancers, who no doubt already think they’re professionals (because who likes to think they’re not professional?). They’ll be thinking: “I’m already a professional freelancer. I don’t need this product.”

“We help freelancers become more professional with automatic streamlined process...”

Again - I am already a professional freelancer. I don’t need this. Give me some concrete examples of what your product can do for me, how it can save me time, money, etc. There are some examples of how you can save me time further down the page, but they’re things that happen once per client (Onboarding, etc) which is once or twice per year. If you could outline a way you can save me time every day or even once a month, it’d be a much more compelling proposition.

rupertjon The new MacBook Pro is kind of great for hackers

Bought my new MBP yesterday. I was expecting to have to get used to the keyboard, but was typing on it just fine straight away. Now I actually prefer the feel to my previous 2012 Air.

rupertjon When Did Americans Lose Their British Accents?

I'm from England, and his accent in that video sounds pretty neutral to me. It's got a bit of a "posh" or "well spoken" edge to it, but in terms of region, that's going to be somewhere around the south of England, excluding places like the south west and parts of London, which have distinct accents.