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This is a wonderful game! If you don't have access to a country house library, then there is a card-based version:

https://oxfordgames.co.uk/shop/ex-libris/

somewhatoffon Twitter internal panel linked to account hijackings

I was told that a bank would not approve a transaction because the signature I had provided in a Word document was not similar enough to the one on file.

Helpfully, they provided me with a screenshot of the one they had on file... one copy and paste later and the problem was resolved.

One copy and paste

somewhatoffon My Letter to the Editor of New York Times Magazine

Langewiesche himself wrote about exactly this paradox in this (excellent) piece on the Air France 447 crash:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-...

somewhatoffon Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

The Serverless framework provides offline functionality (https://github.com/dherault/serverless-offline) to do this - I've found it works pretty well.

somewhatoffon We’re Reading Fahrenheit 451 Wrong (2018)

It’s also worth noting that he also describes the ‘primitive’ world and it’s awful. He was encouraging balance, not a rejection of one or the other.

somewhatoffon Vanlife: Build your own van to live on the road

When I was hitchhiking, people would say 'nobody hitchhikes anymore'. I'd point out that a good hitchhiker is in a car, not by the side of the road...

somewhatoffon Pypeline: A Python library for creating concurrent data pipelines

I wonder if you might compare this to Bonobo [https://www.bonobo-project.org/] which I think has similar design goals?

somewhatoffon Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

The majority (> 80%) are life peers, appointed in theory for being distinguished in their field. So yes, many experts among them. For example: https://www.parliament.uk/biographies/lords/lord-winston/177...

somewhatoffon Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two words for tea

The slightly snooty Daily Telegraph style guide:

"Christmas lunch is what most of our readers would eat, not Christmas dinner. Use the latter only if referring specifically to an evening meal."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/about-us/style-book/143530...

somewhatoffon Facebook’s war on free will

The worst is if you turn off notifications from Messenger, it flashes up the red number to tell you you need to turn them back on.

I found it very, very annoying at first... now it's just taught me to ignore the red numbers entirely.

somewhatoffon German Bundeswehr cooperates more closely with European Allies

Turkey is very definitely a NATO member, and has been since 1952.

somewhatoffon A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month

Yep. For me it was running instances that didn't respond to requests to delete or stop. They kept charging anyway.

Support was somebody in a different timezone who complained when I didn't answer my phone in the middle of the night. I quite liked the Google Cloud offering, but to get so burnt so quickly... stay away.

somewhatoffon Airflow and the Future of Data Engineering: A Q&A

Thanks, that's really interesting. The usage of 'pipeline' to describe both sorts of system made me think there was a lot of overlap, but I'm understanding now how they are complementary.

somewhatoffon Airflow and the Future of Data Engineering: A Q&A

How would you see Airflow in relation to Apache Beam / GC Dataflow?

somewhatoffon Post-Olympic Abandonment

The Olympic park in London is bringing lots of new facilities - an innovation park, a university campus, a theatre etc and thousands of new homes.

London is an exception to olympic abandonment to my mind - it's doing a lot of the success of east London on what was previously polluted industrial land.

somewhatoffon Ask HN: Best practices for OS X dev environments

I do the same, but I've had trouble with the overhead of virtual machines (admittedly on an older laptop). Have you not found this to be a problem at all?

As deployments get simpler and the usefulness of Ansible for server config declines, I'm thinking about abandoning the VMs and going back to running things in OS X.

somewhatoffon A Dangerous and Costly Photo in Japan

Yes, it's awful how East London got great new transport links, sporting facilities and a huge park.

somewhatoffon Show HN: Give 7 billion people a physical address

They do support a lot of other languages, although the words aren't the same between languages as far as I can tell (so they can't be 'translated'). Still, I bet they cover most of the world's population in their local language.

somewhatoffon Show HN: Give 7 billion people a physical address

You mean, like http://what3words.com/ ? I really like the idea.

somewhatoffon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (September 2014)

Location: London

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: For the right offer

Technologies: CTO / product leader. Background in Python and associated web frameworks. Particularly interested in data processing / machine learning.

Resume: http://techcitylabs.com/assets/Sims_Benjamin_CV.pdf

Email: jobs at the domain referred to above

somewhatoffon Show HN: ZipLocate, a free API for zip code geolocation

I made up this demo:

http://whatpostcodeamiin.com

which uses browser location finding to tell you what postcode you are in (more or less). If you'd be interested, I have a beta API which will return full postcode info based on latitude/longitude; it's kind of beta, but I'd be happy to provide access if you need it.