smidgeon

78 karma · joined November 11, 2024

smidgeonon Alcohol makes male fruit flies more attractive

It certainly does, look at the wings on that bad-boy [hic]

smidgeonon The Case Against Character Count Line Limits

It probably all started with typewriters (and teleprinters).

Nope, it started with books where 500 years of typographic practice has taught us that anything above 80 characters a line quickly becomes unreadable.

smidgeonon How Much Would You Need to Be Paid to Live on a Deserted Island and Kill Seals?

I assumed this was about Greenland ...

smidgeonon I thought the free market was with us forever

So much of what Thatcher did in the wake of her 1983 general election victory seems so obvious now. We take it for granted that private companies play a pivotal role in providing our water, electricity, gas, railways, ports and freight.

And now the rivers are full of shit. Thanks Maggie.

smidgeonon Germany tightens travel advice to US after three citizens detained

Then I won't go there either, meh

smidgeonon Germany tightens travel advice to US after three citizens detained

I used to, interesting people there, but stopped when they brought in fingerprinting ...

smidgeonon Reintroductions of beavers into the wild in several parts of England

I used to thumb a lot, standing by the side of the road you often see these car delivery lads, but only briefly; always picked up within a few minutes. I toyed with the idea of getting myself some fake trade-plates but thought better of it (they're mostly pretty hard looking blokes ...)

smidgeonon France is about to pass the worst surveillance law in the EU

The UK government response: "Challenge accepted!"

smidgeonon Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row

End-to-end-encryption-except-when-the-UK-government-is-interested doesn't have the same ring to it, liable to damage the brand ....

smidgeonon Greg K-H: "Writing new code in Rust is a win for all of us"

The real reason being the longing for the 5 hour kernel compile of yore.

smidgeonon Representing Graphs in PostgreSQL

Unrelated to the tech, just the graph-based algorithm (recommender stuff) that we had in mind did not give us the results we were hoping for ... and other things were queued up to be tried ...

smidgeonon Representing Graphs in PostgreSQL

I got bitten by the same, we were looking at switching to memgraph (which is also Cypher, but C++ rather than Java), sadly abandoned for other reasons ...

smidgeonon The AI Fad Just Burned to the Waterline

More use of the work "crikey" is needed

smidgeonon Issues with Color Spaces and Perceptual Brightness

Available in several formats at http://seaviewsensing.com/pub/cpt-city/mpl/

smidgeonon Why is my CPU usage always 100%?

For the confused: https://www.xkcd.com/1172/

smidgeonon 'Mainlined into UK's veins': Labour announces public rollout of AI

I liked those: "A bridge to Ireland" had me rolling on the floor ...

smidgeonon I Closed My LinkedIn (2019)

Earlier discussion (2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23486938

smidgeonon The price of a cigarette: 20 minutes of life?

Anyone else puzzled by the declaration of interests?

... He is a paid advisor to QNovia, a company that is developing a therapeutic inhaled nicotine delivery device. ... All authors declare no financial links with tobacco companies, e-cigarette manufacturers, or their representatives.

smidgeonon Phone Is Dirtier Than a Toilet Seat

Would you rest your face on a toilet-seat so cleaned?

smidgeonon Revealed: Bias found in AI system used to detect UK benefits fraud

Clearly trained on Benefits Britain: Life on the Dole

smidgeonon Fair Organ Preservation Society

That's an organisation in need of a hyphen: "fair organ-preservation" sounds really quite unpleasant ...

smidgeonon When was the famous "sudo warning" introduced? (2019)

My first experience of Unix was on a dumb terminal on a university AIX (?) machine, I had heard that "man" was how you got to the documentation, so duly typed "man", the resulting

   Apropos what?

made me laugh out loud, and the others in the room gave me a funny look.

smidgeonon Ask HN: Recommend me some silent movies

L'Argent by Marcel L'Herbier is rather splendid

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0019646/

smidgeonon Ask HN: Why is 100K singular but 20Megs plural?

To avoid confusion with really big angry sharks

smidgeonon Ask HN: At what age are you aging out in tech?

Whatever it is, when you reach it you'll find that it's advanced by a couple of years ...

smidgeonon The Onion buys Infowars

Are you as confident about the 22nd?

smidgeonon Percent of startups that claim to use AI, by year

Only 0.6% of startups claim to use AI, I expected it would be higher.

I am so bad in python that I had to ask ChatGPT to create the plot for me

smidgeonon LED lights on underside of surfboards may deter great white shark attacks

The opposite it true, as anyone who has seen the documentary "The Meg" will attest.