simpleigh

That's not right, I'm afraid - the Underground is usually profitable and subsidises loss-making forms of transport (particularly buses). Here's some high-level, pre-pandemic figures: https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2018/03/average-yield-and...

(based on TfL's draft budget for 2018-19)

> The point of looking at the monetary value is that it's a way to quantify how unavailable they are. Land costs money. Where land is scarce, it becomes expensive. Where land is abundant, it's cheap. If landing slots can be acquired cheaply, it means there is availability.

Sure, but I think you're missing the point about the "non-availability." I don't think the cost shows everything.

When there's lots of slots available then the price will be low. When there's few slots available then the price will be high. When there's _very few_ slots available then prices are harder to compare. There's an upper limit on what a company will pay (a slot can only provide so much profit, after all, even if you expect to own it for many years). Prices will presumably start to depend more on who's bidding for them and what deals can be struck.

Free market economics only works if the market is able to respond (i.e. it's relatively liquid).

I'm a big fan of The Old Reader. The UI is quite similar to Google Reader (as I remember it), and because it's only focussed on feeds it's not cluttered with other functionality. There's even a working Windows Phone app (TORUC) for those of us still avoiding Apple or Google.

I've taken out a subscription in the hope that it will last longer than Google Reader or Bloglines (anybody remember that?).

"Submit autopsy report" is in the top navigation bar, although it links to an external form service: https://siftery-track.typeform.com/to/n5IT7u.

If you're a "data controller," then you may be required to register with the local DPA (Data Protection Authority). In the UK, for example [1]:

"The Data Protection Act 1998 requires every data controller (eg organisation, sole trader) who is processing personal information to register with the ICO, unless they are exempt. More than 400,000 organisations are currently registered."

Whether this registration achieves anything useful is another question.

[1] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/register/

I don't agree with this strategy. A spare PC under a desk might work perfectly for years without any trouble. Alternatively you might spill coffee over it next week and destroy the server - and your business.

If you don't know how you'll need to scale then chuck up a `t2.nano` instance on AWS and use that. In return for a tiny monthly cost you get: - solid network connectivity - disk snapshots for backups - geographically redundant storage (S3) for static resources so you can survive the server hosing itself - monitoring of CPU load / status / disk usage - the ability to scale the server up vertically with the click of a mouse and 60 seconds' downtime - (with a tiny bit more work and cost) automatic scaling so you cope _automatically_ if the server falls over or load increases

Clearly it's possible for the Swedish prosecutor to find a means to interview him in the embassy. They could use the telephone. They could use a videoconferencing system. They could get on a plane.

Why should they?

They have a valid arrest warrant for a fugitive. Their usual process is for the fugitive to be brought to a convenient location in Sweden for questioning. Why does this fugitive have the right to insist a public servant comes to see them? (Assange's fears about extradition to the US aren't relevant to the Swedish prosecutor if they aren't intending to do that).

If I were a prosecutor dealing with a busy case load I might well do the same: especially when I can leave the whole mess for the UK to deal with!

> The reasons given, that XUL requires maintenance that Mozilla engineers don't enjoy doing, is a joke considering the amount of effort to maintain XUL is less than 1% of the amount of effort to move Firefox to HTML.

Ah, but maintaining XUL means working on old code (which is boring), but moving Firefox to HTML means working on new shiny code (which is exciting).

https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

Although they don't seem to be in any rush - only 19 of 28 EU countries have joined the Euro according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurozone .

Why not just expand the original query? A search for "devise ruby" works pretty well (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=devise+ruby).

I've long given up searching for trendily-named JavaScript libraries without adding "js" to the search term.

A few years ago there was a series of adverts in the UK advertising exactly this danger. You might think you're OK with only a broken nose, but you've just crushed the person in front of you to death.

Sorry to sound so melodramatic, but I think that was the point of the advert!

Are you sure the button becomes difficult to use? I might be very wrong here, but I'd at least hope that "release easily even when hanging upside down" might be a design requirement of the average safety belt buckle. Perhaps this is why aircraft belts have very different buckles than car belts? Can anyone provide more detail?

I agree with this - the right place to restrict the number of concurrent database queries is the database, not the whole IO layer!

The article addresses this:

> The -F for grep indicates that we are only matching on fixed strings and not doing any fancy regex, and can offer a small speedup, which I did not notice in my testing.

I guess grep is probably clever enough to choose a faster matching algorithm once it's parsed the pattern and discovered it doesn't contain any regex fun.

I agree with this completely. I think the point of all interviews should be to start a conversation - and the sort of broad technical conversation this question inspires is a really good way to see both what candidates know and how they communicate it.

I've had candidates fail to explain the distinction between the client and the server. I had one candidate exclaim "I hoped you'd ask this" and jump straight into a discussion on the parsing of cache-control headers by proxy servers.

I found sed great for messing around with SVN repository dumps. Delete a few lines here to remove the commit that added a directory... change a few paths to pretend the files in that directory had always been somewhere else... add a few lines somewhere else.

Sed scripts are a quick way to automate simple edits to large files.

> Of course I know about HTTP verbs PUT and DELETE and HEAD-- is there really any web dev who doesn't?

Yes: I've interviewed some. Very few realise there's any more than GET/PUT/POST/DELETE, which astonished me: surely everyone's left an HTTP debugger running while updating an SVN repo or browsing a WebDAV share?

Only the other week I managed to mouse-twitch into existence a file that rm refused to remove.

Personally I much prefer the Bakerloo. The seats are much more comfortable than anything more recent.

The Bakerloo is pretty low down the list of an upgrade, apparently. Counter-intuitively this is because the trains need substantial refurbishment within the next few years - unfortunately this will be necessary before new stock will become available, so it makes sense to refurbish and then run for longer.

Care to share any?

Reasons I can think of:

Existing automation may be insufficiently good to cope with adverse weather and unplanned situations. Technology has moved on considerably since the Victoria, Central and Jubilee stock. We're automating cars now, after all. The article mentions a new signalling system being rolled out in support.

Lack of platform-edge doors. TfL have stated they won't run driverless trains without these. These are planned for installation on the Piccadilly line as part of the new stock rollout.

Communication from CloudFlare to your server is over the open Internet, whereas that from an ELB to an EC2 instance is within Amazon's datacentre.

It is an option, but not always the best option.

I think it was one of the Mars landers where they disabled error detection for landing. If the system reset near the ground then the lander would crash before the controller had rebooted, whereas a small error might not have disrupted the landing at all.

Fail fast is good advice, but should be weighed against other strategies to choose the most appropriate one for the circumstance.

But those frequencies don't get to the speaker 'cause the amplifier doesn't send them...

I've always thought it a nice feature of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (bear with me here...) that the general confession covers "those things which we ought to have done" before mentioning "those things which we ought not to have done".

All that is required for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.

I'm not a pythonista but would question your recommendation of mod_python - the (current) top post at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6616550 (also on the front page right now) states that "mod_python has been dead for so long now that its death has gone from a liability to a potential asset".

I totally agree that application code shouldn't be in a web-accessible directory - but that's a hosting/configuration problem, not a PHP (or even mod_php) problem. It's trivial to set up an index.php which bootstraps an application stored elsewhere on the server.

Microsoft have lots of driver issues too: hardware manufacturers build buggy drivers that break Windows. They're making progress on this via WHQL and Windows Logo labelling. Unfortunately it's not obvious that a "Works on Linux" logo scheme will have much effect without wider consumer adoption (which, in classic chicken/egg fashion, is hindered by shonky drivers)!

... and ignoring case obviously gets us down here:

    ^[a-z]([a-z]+|\d+)@[a-z]+\.[a-z]+$

I might be wrong, but ISTR that no longer works 'cause RFC822 has been superseded (the new RFC extends the domain of valid addresses).

The term "works" is relative of course - I don't suppose anyone actually uses that regex!

I don't think it can - the local-part of the original matches as (a letter followed by letters) or (a letter followed by numbers):

    [A-Za-z]([A-Za-z]+|(?:\d+))
    =>
    [A-Za-z]([A-Za-z]+|\d+)

Your version doesn't match this: - it allows numbers and digits to be interleaved - it allows the local-part to start with a digit

    [a-z0-9]+ != ([a-z]+|\d+)

Unless I'm being daft, it can't be reduced to that at all. Dropping matching brackets, removing redundant {1,1} blocks, and escaping the \. we get down to:

    ^[A-Za-z]([A-Za-z]+|\d+)@[A-Za-z]+\.[A-Za-z]+$

Your version isn't the same at all - \w allows letters digits and underscores anywhere, whereas the original is more subtle.