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turkeywelder

177 karma · joined June 20, 2014

Developer at Timetastic
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turkeywelder··on Analysis: EVs are now nine times cheaper than petrol or diesel to drive in UK
Repair costs are very high (and take ages) and most of them are expensive cars outright which puts the premiums up.

Performance being pretty high on even a basic Tesla doesn't help things either. The insurance market in the UK is very expensive anyway and any excuse to wind up premiums they'll gladly use.

turkeywelder··on UK total wind generation record beaten today
Love your stuff Robin. The graphs and wind turbine model are particular favourites

How can we fix the curtailment problem? Storage nearer the turbines or just more transmission capacity generally? I presume we'd saturate storage pretty quickly so is it just a case of running more grid wiring from Scotland to say.. Manchester?

turkeywelder··on Dark patterns: Buying a Bahncard at Deutsche Bahn
Idiotic Brit here.

Not exactly how we think. We're frustrated that our private railway is worse than DB in terms of lateness and cancellations but also hugely, massively more expensive for us to use.

We'd be happy if it was publicly owned because then at least the insane profit from ticket sales might possibly just maybe make it into investment in the railway instead of someone's bonus.

turkeywelder··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2025)
Location: Manchester, UK

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: c# .NET, React, Javascript, Typescript, SQL (Full stack .net dev)

Résumé/CV: Available on request

Email: garethterrace at gmail

It's time for a new challenge. I've been working on https://timetastic.co.uk full time since 2017 and have worn many hats from setting up an API, to setting up blogs and websites, to building features, to design, debugging, vuln scanning, DNS, Email setup and everything in between.

I've been in software for 16+ years and have worked in SaaS, B2B, internal tools and all sorts. I thrive in small, productive teams where I can get deeply involved and get things done.

No recruiters, no gambling/betting.

turkeywelder··on Stop Trying to Schedule a Call with Me
This is why we have a flat "we won't fill in your forms" rule and only take card payments. We've lost some clients because of it sure, but we're a small team so it's fine.

I think being up front about what you will and won't do really helps. They still ask for procurement forms and stuff but we can at least deny it and set an expectation.

https://help.timetastic.co.uk/hc/en-us/articles/115003288769...

turkeywelder··on Azure Down?
Our parent company are having issues in UKSouth but we're spread across UKSouth and UKWest and not seeing any issues. Apparently Functionapps also having issues, but we're seeing nothing at the moment.
turkeywelder··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2024)
Location: Manchester, UK

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: C#, .NET, React, JS, some Typescript, MSSQL, Gatsby

Résumé/CV: on request - I don't have linkedin since the breach

Email: garethterrace at gmail

I'm a full stack dev, I work best in C#/.NET with React and really like smaller companies. Starting to look for my next opportunity after 10 years working on Timetastic. Only decided to start looking today, so still writing up the CV!

Cheers

turkeywelder··on Signal says it'll shut down in UK if Online Safety Bill approved
Raise it with the ombudsman!
turkeywelder··on Ask HN: What are some cool but obscure data structures you know about?
Might not be very obscure but it was new to me. Ended up being really useful for finding out whether dates intersect a particular period and ended up using it quite a bit at work.

Range Tree:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_tree

You give it a range of dates and it'll tell you if any intersect so if you're looking for "how many people are absent in this time period" you can really quickly find out by using a range tree.

turkeywelder··on HelloInbox – Ultimate email deliverability checklist and toolkit
We send a "weekly summary" email of who is absent in your company in the next week.

At 9am on a Monday we send roughly 100k emails via Sendgrid and have very very low spam report rates. Transactional email for even relatively small SaaS companies can get high very quickly.

As much as us in the dev world rely on Slack and try to avoid notification overload, my experience is most people want things as an email.

turkeywelder··on The 0.5 MB of nothing in all Apple Music files (2020)
That's how most of Europe do decimal places, using commas instead of full stops.
turkeywelder··on Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers?
I miss Grooveshark so much - Licensing issues aside it was one of the best UIs for music ever. I'd love to hear more stories about the backend
turkeywelder··on Ask HN: How do you manage your companies knowledge base?
All the business knowledge is in Basecamp as that's where all the "work planning" is done. If you want to find out how a specific feature works, or how the decisions were made for that, go find the project in Basecamp, it'll be archived if it's shipped but it's still searchable.

For new dev setup/infrastructure stuff we use a github Wiki and the new starters point out issues in that for us - their first tasks are to update it if they find issues or missing info because it forces them to go and dig around to find the knowledge islands - they're the best people for it because it's who we want to solve the problem for.

Admittedly we've got a small company and a nice tight tech stack but there's still tribal knowledge in 2-3 people's heads and distilling that out to the team is a slow process of pair programming and explanation.

turkeywelder··on Issue with Cloudflare currently returning blank pages
They've been having lots of issues lately. Broke our entire login flow by setting multiple set cookie headers.

https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/30ptcb3b0s2w

Support taking days to get back to us.

Not sure what's happening but it's leaving a bad taste

turkeywelder··on Launch HN: Onfolk (YC S21) – Modern HR and Payroll in One Place (For the UK)
Hello from a fellow UK HR (ish) company. This looks like a strong start - payroll is hard!

Good luck, we all need to band together to get rid of these insane portals of horrible UX

turkeywelder··on Duolingo S-1 IPO
> •users feel that their experience is diminished as a result of the decisions we make with respect to the frequency, prominence, format, size and quality of ads that we display;

They should show short video ads in the language you're learning, so the challenge is to understand the ad. Free learning, better engagement and actually relevant ads.

I'd be up for that I think

turkeywelder··on Sriracha hit revenue of $150M a year with no sales team or ad spend
If anyone's in the sauce shipping game, try and get the Huy Fong one distributed in the UK. The market here is dominated by "flying goose" sriracha which is good, but not the same as the Huy Fong and there's a fair market for it here I think.
turkeywelder··on How Intuitive Are Macs Really?
ohh that option thing is well hidden, thanks for that. Is there a keyboard shortcut for it?
turkeywelder··on How Intuitive Are Macs Really?
> Like the first time after a boot/login?

More often than that - I knew it'd ask on fresh boot, but this is after switching users or just a night where it pretends to sleep. I'm still tracking it down and figuring out the scenarios. I'm not averse to it as an OS, I just want to understand why it's done something when it has.

turkeywelder··on How Intuitive Are Macs Really?
In our use it was perfectly fine, it'll run fine with 4gb of ram and a Celeron. I wouldn't want to do hardcore software dev on one because they're usually low end screens and CPUs, but as a "here's a safe machine you can't break" they're absolutely brilliant for family.

Boot time is instant, OS updates are instant, battery life is great, if there was ever "linux for the desktop" it's ChromeOS.

It's not all roses though: full disclosure: our Chromebook is stuck on Chrome 68 so these might not apply any more.

- The file management is poor, a zip file can and will confuse it

- Bluetooth is Windows XP levels of stable, if you get a device it likes you're good, but it can be finicky.

- The device has a fixed expiry date where they stop getting software updates, this is the big kicker for me, because we had a perfectly functional machine that was a bit old that just got turned into E waste because nobody wanted to support the software any more. Shame because it was a fantastic machine. I'm hoping our Mac lasts longer than the Chromebook it's replacing

turkeywelder··on How Intuitive Are Macs Really?
Recent M1 user here - I had a PowerPC mac back in the Leopard/Tiger days. I thought OSx would have come on leaps and bounds since then.

It's....more or less unchanged. As well as this crazy installer thing, there's quite a bit about Macs that just seems off.. My list of "things that don't seem right" as a long term Windows/ChromeOS user

- Window snapping isn't built in outside of fullscreen mode (seriously?!)

- Sleeping the mac does not sleep the mac, it wakes up at all sorts of times

- Every time the OS updates, I have to go through a setup process again, trying to upsell me on iCloud drive. Nothing updates as nicely as ChromeOS but I'd hope for at least a reboot and back to where I left off

- TouchID for login works....but not often enough - it constantly pesters me for a password

- Pressing enter renames a file rather than opens it. What?

- The Finder is either named ironically or I'm not getting it - file paths are obscured, seeing file details is hidden behind a dialog.

We bought the M1 because ChromeOS didn't like our old Samsung printer and the VPN software my partner uses and Google had killed the update life for it for...reasons. In an expensive lesson of "whoops", the Mac doesn't like the printer either.

A lot of this is me getting back into it and getting used to things, but I sort of miss ChromeOS.

In Apple's defence, the hardware is amazing and the bluetooth is fantastic. Could have put a port on either side to make charging nicer though.

turkeywelder··on Requests dropped when using Cloudflare’s free tier for a commercial project
I'm starting to lose faith in cloudflare lately - we're on the business plan and there's been some really strange UI bugs in the dashboard where it looks like state just isn't reflected properly (Access and Load Balancing being ones we see quite a bit)

Summary of things that we've had issues with lately:

- Caching of a specific route just stopped working. I log a support ticket (nightmare to find in the dashboard) and miraculously it starts working again after the ticket gets responsded to.

- Some of our staff got locked out of part of our app because we exceeded the 5 free users of the "Access" plan. Upgraded to the 50 user plan in the new Teams part and it still didn't work. Contacted support, fixed again but no explanation. (multiple day turnaround on tickets)

We're invested in their tech a lot and I love workers - they really take some big tasks off us. If Azure come up with something compelling we'll probably switch though (assuming I can make sense of Azure's billing and product naming strategy)

turkeywelder··on WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebook or stop using app
that'll never happen - WhatsApp is almost WeChat for Europe, it's ubiquitous and the network effect is so strong you'll really struggle to get masses of people to switch away fom it.

99% of people outside of the HN bubble will just look at the dialog, click OK and carry on as normal.

turkeywelder··on Pricing Low-Touch SaaS
We did the same, it's I think one of our best moves because everyone just gets the same price, nobody feels like they're missing out and it's super easy to administrate so we can concentrate on the product, not the pricing.
turkeywelder··on A Guide to Pricing Plans
Nothing at all wrong with it. It's just something we haven't done yet. Priorities, features and bugs all battle for our limited resources.
turkeywelder··on A Guide to Pricing Plans
As a consumer I'm really not a fan of these techniques. I'm biased but our SaaS just has one price, no annual discount, no messing. It seems to be working out. I think people appreciate the straightforward approach when everything these days seems to have a pricing table.
turkeywelder··on Zappy – Screen capture tool
It's good for captures, but awful for annotations. Try the following:

- Draw a straight line on an image (you have to pick the ruler, then draw along the ruler)

- Drawn an arrow on an image (not freehand)

- surround something with a box

- Add some text

It just falls too short

turkeywelder··on Zappy – Screen capture tool
Can you port it to Windows? Windows has, from what I can tell, no decent screenshotting + annotating tool that compares with Skitch or any of the Mac alternatives.

Lightshot comes the closest to a decent, light, free alternative but it's still not ideal.

The built in Windows tool is nice (win + shift + S) but there's no arrows, it's a faff to get straight lines and it's just up to the quality of the OSX tools.

I started making one but like all side projects it just sits there waiting for that elusive "free time".

Thanks

turkeywelder··on Eon Switches All U.K. Customers to Renewable Power
In the UK we're always about 15% nuclear power[1]. Removing the huge proportion of gas should be next on the list, ideally with more zero carbon and nuclear power.

[1]http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/index.php

turkeywelder··on Apple Said to Have 'Dramatically Reduced' iPhone Repair Fraud in China
yes, even if I paid for it. Only solution is to replace the device.
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