tomalpha

A relatively simple system of lights is used at Portsmouth Harbour to help the aircraft carriers navigate the narrow channel in and out of port.

This looks to be similar to the 3-light system that the author talks about.

https://insidedio.blog.gov.uk/2016/08/22/safe-approach-to-po...

    To provide navigational certainty the vessel’s navigator visually aligns one set of three up with the other (i.e. they act as a pair) and because each of the three lights is a different colour the navigator can be certain he’s lining up the correct lights.

It’s always hard to tell whether a comment like this is supportive or sarcastic so this is either me agreeing or disagreeing with you…

For me this kind of simple, straightforward, educational content is part of the reason I’m proud to pay my TV licence.

One of my favourite quotes from the late Terry Pratchett:

> When the first explorers from the warm lands around the Circle Sea travelled into the chilly hinterland they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by grabbing the nearest native, pointing at some distant landmark, speaking very clearly in a loud voice, and writing down whatever the bemused man told them. Thus were immortalised in generations of atlases such geographical oddities as Just A Mountain, I Don't Know, What? and, of course, Your Finger You Fool.

NTSB preliminary report into the March LaGuardia crash

It might be in the original French, but it’s been anglicised and adopted as an English language term:

https://www.oed.com/dictionary/toot-sweet_adv?tl=true

Sorry, I should have been clearer. I too get the same for Mac apps, but for iOS apps still see the same competitor results returned first. For me, that's the same whether I use the App Store from my phone, or laptop.

I just searched within the (edit: iOS App Store) App Store app for

     ublock origin lite
    “ublock origin lite”

For the unquoted search, there are twelve different apps/items returned above it - you really have to scroll down to find it at number 13.

Even for the quoted search, it’s returned in fourth place.

More interestingly the second time I searched with quoted it’s in third place, and the third time of searching the sponsored items at the top is getting even more random.

I wonder if this has survived the recent cutbacks to USAID?

    And recently they are celebrating some big news on the lead fighting front: This week, UNICEF and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) announced a new $150 million initiative to combat lead poisoning

Wonderfully, the official government webpage[1] lists his duties as:

  Larry spends his days greeting guests to the house, inspecting security defences and testing antique furniture for napping quality. His day-to-day responsibilities also include contemplating a solution to the mouse occupancy of the house. Larry says this is still ‘in tactical planning stage’.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/history/10-downing-street#larr...

It seems wrong that each individual sysadmin human in Space X would need to (a) login to my device remotely, and (b) require individual credentials to do so.

Having some way to remotely push updates, and having some kinda of (preferably with your consent!) remote access might be reasonable, but I would expect that to be via some kind of intermediate gateway/app/something and not direct from a sysadmin’s individual account.

I too would have asked the same question as GP, and also meant it genuinely. It feels like HN is a place where someone could summarise the (presumably strong) arguments against this? Or links to a good source as suggested by a sibling comment.

In the UK, they tend to rate highly in terms of reliability. They can’t be that differently made to the US?

For example [1], [2]

[1] https://www.warrantydirect.co.uk/blog/most-reliable-used-car...

[2] https://www.honestjohn.co.uk/guides/most-reliable-car-brands...

Better link to the original announcement: https://www.spreadsheet.com/blog/spreadsheet-com-will-be-ret...

This was a regular court process, with an independent judge and jury. It’s just the prosecution was run directly by the post office and not the public prosecutor.

It still had very bad outcomes, and clearly with the prosecution not being independent enough, but it wasn’t an entirely closed process.

The killer features of BBC Basic for me were:

- instant-on - you turned on the power switch at the back of the BBC Micro, got the double beep, and in less than a second were dropped into a REPL / shell with the language

- integrated assembler - you could inline assembly language really easily

- great documentation - before the web, documentation meant books - of which there were many - but also crucially in the BBC Micro's case also many television shows from the BBC.

- direct access to hardware - I realise this isn't BBC Basic itself really, but being able to PEEK and POKE (well, use ? and ! operators) to memory-mapped hardware addresses was great fun, and a great way to learn about how things worked.

The nostalgia for me around the language is strong, but without the hardware platform I'm not sure I'd want to go back to it.

The yahoo link you reference in [1] notes “All numbers in thousands”

I think you might be off by 3 orders of magnitude and google could “afford” to pay every homeless person a thousand times more than you’re suggesting.

I further think that undermines your argument about the problem being fundamentally intractable due to the scale.

How much cheaper are RISC-V chips in reality?

I get there might be a saving for not having to pay ARM a royalty of some kind, but are RISC-V chips cheaper in practice as a result?

I was under the impression (rightly or wrongly) that the arm royalties per chip were really small.

A sibling comment makes the more relevant point about powerline, but it’s worth considering that whatever the power company has to pay, you the consumer will be paying for in the end.

You could make the case (a good one I think) that a homeowner providing connectivity should get a discount to their bill, or that the power company could directly charge for a separate communication channel.

That’s kinda saying the same thing in different ways and depending on your point of view they might not feel fair perhaps. But the consumer is paying either way.

Edit: “separate communication channel” could include a human meter reader too!

> Elon will allow people he disagrees with on the platform

I’m not comfortable relying on a single “benevolent” dictator decided what is and isn’t allowed on the platform.

Particularly because the benevolence or lack thereof is, at best, hotly debated in this context.

I like to think some awards are less bad than others. See Autocar’s blog[1] about how they voted for the Car Of The Year award which they do every year. It seems to be reasonably transparent.

[1] https://www.autocar.co.uk/opinion/new-cars/how-autocar-voted...

To be fair, a glance at her LinkedIn profile (top google search result for her name) suggests that 1969 could well be her birth year.

I’d go further for the specific example of the book. For me the price of reading a good book isn’t a price at all. It’s a gain. I’ve paid the first up front price to be able to read the book and gain enjoyment from it.

I get that there are different reasons for reading a book, but even then, it also seems overly simplistic and absolutist to me.

A single game of Factorio can take a long time. Mine usually take around 100 hours.

The craving to (tweak|move|refactor|grow) the base for certain personality types that are richly represented on HN can mean you can spend hundreds more on it too.

Such a summary can be very helpful to disambiguate the subject matter and save me (and I’m guessing many other folks too) the time of reading every article to find out whether it’s interesting/relevant to me.

I’m guessing you’re referring to a jurisdiction within the US?

In the UK the law is clear and explicit: it’s on the retailer (and not the manufacturer or wholesaler) to make sure the goods are “Fit for purpose”, “As described”, and of “Satisfactory quality”.

There’s no wiggle room for “consumer guessed the goods might not be as described”.

https://www.which.co.uk/consumer-rights/regulation/consumer-...

I can imagine there are some US jurisdictions where something similar is also true.

It very much is to protect vulnerable customers, but it’s not wholly altruistic. UK Banks are (mostly) required to make customers whole if they’ve been defrauded unless they’ve been grossly negligent. The banks have tried to interpret the “gross” part fairly broadly but the regulator and Financial Ombudsman (legally mandated arbitration for consumers where that’s actually a good thing) interpret “gross” as more extreme than “almost anything”. The result of which is that banks are keen to show that they took every possible step to prevent someone being scammed - whether popping up notices during online payments, or asking in person. If they don’t, they can very easily be required to reimburse the customer themselves.

Edit: digging up a citation suggests that it might be a voluntary code that banks are signed up to [1], but the regulatory regime has still swung much more in favor of the customer.

[1] https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/debt-and-money/banking/ban...

Not the bulk of FTTP connections in the UK, to which this article refers, which run over Openreach’s common last-mile or Virgin Media’s DOCSIS cables. They’re the only National operators offering gigabit, or near-gigabit speeds.

There are plenty of smaller ISPs that run their own fibre and do offer symmetric connections, but the bigger players all off asymmetric connections.

> both of which are just numbers pulled out of thin air

The living wage is not in the UK. Dispute the method all you want of course, but there is a method:

https://www.livingwage.org.uk/calculation

The BBC has always had a public education mandate in some form. My memory is hazy but I feel like it’s faded somewhat in the last couple of decades.

Specifically here the BBC Computer Literacy Project ended up creating a line of home computers, and direct government funding put them in (I think literally) every school.

https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/