5,633 karma · joined November 7, 2015
The Government Digital Service (GDS) code is on GitHub (1.5K repos) and this includes the frontend code for GOV.UK.
They still use Python and Ruby languages, but it's not clear if they are still using Django and Rail frameworks.
Other languages include Javascript, Go and Java: https://github.com/alphagov
I have had these scam delivery text messages. On one occasion, I almost fell for it because the scam text message coincided with an expected parcel delivery. The text messages randomly target people without knowing whether people are expecting parcels, but it undoubtedly succeeds in tricking some people who are genuinely expecting a parcel.
[1] Delivery text scams: the nasty new fraud wave sweeping the UK: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2021/may/18/delivery-text-...
In some ways, electric simplifies things: no complicated gas boiler to need to be serviced every year for safety. And modern induction hobs have some advantages over gas hobs (stovetops).
Narrator from the clip:
"It's really quite frightening the way power and isolation [inside the car] can so transform a man. Yet it's always happening. And women, so often, are better and less selfish drivers than men. What is it that a car does to a fellow?"
Hinkley Point C is an European pressurised reactor (EPR) design, the same design in use for:
- the Olkiluoto 3 power plant in Finland (due to start generating electricity in June 2022)
- Flamanville 3 in France (expected to be completed in 2023 at the earliest)
[1] Source for Hinkley Point: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Hinkley-Point-C-...
YouTube currently has a problem with scammer bot comments appearing on countless amounts of channels, especially those in the investing and finance niche.
And unfortunately, we've been the target of these scammers too. So, I decided to do some investigating and confront my scammers/imposters face-to-face.
The author discovers a third-party tool for removing spam and scammer comments that proves fairly effective.
I think it's fair to ask: how is YouTube, with all it's tech and programming resources, unable to solve the problem of spam, bots and impersonator comments? And yet a third-party tool is able to tackle the same problem more effectively than YouTube?
- A way to signal disagreement with a comment.
- A means to flag a comment as clearly misleading or incorrect.
- A way of signalling a 'low value' comment (obviously subjective).
- A way for the downvoter to simply express his or her displeasure at what has been posted regardless how reasonable the comment is. (This probably happens more often than people care to admit it. It's subtly different than just disagreement.)
One might argue all the above examples are types of 'disagreement'.
An idea: clicking downvote adds the following line to the end of a comment:
1 reader disagrees or 3 readers disagree
It doesn't capture the other examples, but maybe it will deter the other uses.
On the other hand, this might be a terrible idea. It's a difficult problem to solve!
There are also lots of Ask HN submissions that remain a bit stagnant in the Ask HN section for days without much comment. Unlike the fast-moving news homepage, I suspect Ask HN entries need at least a few days to attract attention and comments.
Occasionally, the Ask HN section includes entries that have nothing to do with Ask HN. For example, as I write this message, there is an entry in the Ask HN section (without using the Ask HN title) which is in fact a Show HN entry. (The submission is Python Functional-streams A Library to write concise functional code.) I'm not sure how these entries make their way into Ask HN - perhaps the author edited the title to remove 'Ask HN'?.
We all need to make our own evaluation of the privacy promises of those services and whether they actually provide privacy above and beyond what other companies offer. We shouldn't rely on vague impressions that privacy is strong in company X merely because of their presence in a particular country (and which the company uses heavily for promotion).
Companies charge what they think the market will pay and in this case, consumers (like me!) are willing to pay for almond milk even when it costs more than fresh dairy milk.
But make up your own mind: is almond milk a rip-off given the ingredients? Or a perfectly fine product? Here are the ingredients for two different unsweentened almond milk brands:
- Alpro Almond Milk - 1 litre (Alpro is a popular European brand)
Water, Almonds (2.3%), Calcium (Tri-Calcium Phosphate), Sea Salt, Stabilisers (Locust Bean Gum, Gellan Gum), Emulsifier (Lecithins (Sunflower)), Vitamins (B2, B12, E, D2)
- Asda Almond Milk - 1 litre (UK supermarket own brand)
Water, Almonds (2%), Emulsifier (Sunflower Lecithins), Calcium Phosphate, Stabilisers (Gellan Gum, Carboxy Methyl Cellulose, Xanthan Gum), Salt, Potassium Iodide, Vitamins (B12, D2, B2)
Prices:
- Alpro: £1.80 ($2.50, 2.10€)
- Asda: £0.85 ($1.15, 1.00€)
The pandemic really exposed some of the supermarkets and retailers with no online delivery offering (at least in the UK) e.g. Lidl, Aldi, Primark. All the supermarkets remained open during the pandemic, but the ones without the online delivery option missed the opportunity to expand in the online grocery market.
These web servers are battle-tested and feature-rich. If you add another layer like an application server (Puma, Gunicorn etc) that sits between the server and your programming language does the application server end up duplicating some (most?) of the functionality of the web server?
"Mr Sawhney...said up to 70% of the world's population do not have access to electric washing machines."
As someone who belongs to the 30% (as I suspect are the vast majority of HN), it's a humble reminder how much we take for granted - even with common appliances.
The latest video from the Washing Machine Project channel on YouTube shows the machine in operation. The drum is angled during washing. It then moves to a vertical position and the drum spins faster to rinse the washing while water collects below the drum:
It's interesting that fresh, pasteurised cow's milk is cheaper than a carton of oat milk which is approximately 90% water + oats and thickeners. Almond milk is even worse: approximately 95-97% water + 2-3% almonds and thickeners.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000xwll/amol-rajan-in...
I have heard this too (e.g. https://www.sciencefocus.com/nature/why-are-lobsters-cooked-...). I assume using a 'stun machine' will deliver a electric jolt to the lobster and it would be boiled immediately after.
Is it wrong to boil lobsters alive? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/11/is-it-wrong-to...
Some key points from The Guardian article:
- Boiling alive lobsters is illegal in New Zealand and Switzerland
- Robert Elwood, a professor at Queen's University Belfast, is a leading researcher in this field. He believes lobsters should be killed before boiling.
- Accepted wisdom about crustacean behaviour to painful stimuli is that it is a reflex, not a reaction to pain.
- No experiment can answer questions about pain in crustaceans definitively, but Elwood's research makes him see "as much evidence for pain in crustaceans as there is in many vertebrates".
- The argument against crustacean pain is that their brain structure is so different to ours. We know where pain occurs in the human brain, but those equivalent brain regions do not exist in crustaceans.
- Robert Steneck, professor of marine sciences at the University of Maine, has been studying lobsters since 1983: "I'm not convinced they feel pain...The problem has more to do with how we anthropomorphise various critters"
- Maisie Tomlinson, a campaigner for a charity called Crustacean Compassion, says "It’s estimated that an edible crab that is boiled alive may take up to three minutes to lose consciousness. That’s something that would be unconscionable in a vertebrate animal, where they talk about milliseconds to lose consciousness [in a slaughterhouse]"
- Is there a best way to kill a lobster? For a restaurant, professor Robert Elwood says "I would have [a device] that gave them electrical stunning, which completely destroys the central nervous system in a microsecond".
If it hadn't being ruinously expensive, what were your reasons for preferring a gas cooker over induction?
I have a gas cooker, but have used a induction stove a few times and liked it. The induction model I used was not as controllable as a gas flame, but I understand this can vary by brand or model.
I see induction gaining popularity - it is supposedly more energy-efficient than gas, can cook some dishes more quickly (boiling water is fast), and is much easier to clean than a gas stovetop.
I can't resist mentioning this book. It's not fiction, but it reads like fiction - it has all the ingredients for a compelling fiction story: oversized characters, delusions of grandeur, deception, giant egos, and so much more. But it's not fiction, it's all true. Hollywood wants to make it into a movie, and when you read the book you'll know exactly why.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4ACoHa3lqM
The sculpture was commissioned by a company called musicMagpie who let you buy and sell used electronic devices (as well as other things).
More about the sculpture in this page from the musicMagpie site, including statistics about the amount of e-waste in the US, Japan, Germany and the UK:
The stranglehood that OOP has over developers has loosened a bit in recent years. In particular, a whole class of newer programming languages (pun intended), e.g. Rust, Go, Nim, Julia, do not pitch themselves as OOP languages, although they all have object-like features.
There was a time when OOP so completely dominated the profession that any programmer who disliked or struggled with OOP was cast as a programming pariah. Thankfully those days have passed.
Edited to add...
The article states: "the rules will aim to make companies pay more tax in the countries where they are selling their products or services, rather than wherever they end up declaring their profits."
The following scenario is unclear to me: A software company based in a European country sell their SaaS product to primarily US customers. The majority of their profits are made with US customers, but the company has no office presence in the US. Does that mean the profit from US sales is subject to the rules of this new tax law? (I assume not, but I could be mistaken.) I assume this law only applies if the company has a physical presence in the US. (But now wondering if my interpretation is correct!)
Covid: Pfizer and AstraZeneca jabs effective against Indian variant - study:
One of the problems is that the link shown in the text message masks the URL of the duplicitous website. This is in contrast to desktop browsers, where you can see the destination URL of the link text in the browser status bar before you click on the link. In a text message, this is not possible.
People tap the link in the text message which opens the link in their mobile browser. Few people, I suspect, look at the URL in the browser address bar. And if they do, the small size of the browser address bar will show only a portion of the URL - the portion of a URL that may not arouse suspicion.
Another question: how do these scammers get mobile numbers? I suspect there are many online personal data breaches which are never reported e.g. a breach from an online retailer, or maybe a friend with your contact details who has been hacked.
I was thinking along a similar line. There are popular rock climbing channels on YouTube. Some of these channels already include promotional or sponsored content. One option is to pay to include your product in a video ("sponsored by Chalk Rebels, get 20% off your first order with this exclusive discount code").
Or send them your products and ask if they would be willing to try and review your product, no strings attached. There may be a risk they may not like your product (hopefully not). Also, best to keep in mind that some proportion of subscribers to a climbing channel will not necessarily be climbers.
Most Subscribed Rock Climbing YouTube Channels (2017~2020):
The list of channels is in the description below the video:
- US fast food and drink portions can be oversized, or
- UK fast food and drink portions are measly compared to what US customers get
- The Exclusion Zone covers an area of around 2,800 sq km - and seems to have undergone a rewilding transformation
- Some of the animals that have grown in population: lynx, bison, boar, elk, roe deer, and wolves
- Recent plant research shows that contamination of wheat, rye, oats and barley grown near the area are still above acceptable levels
- James Smith from the University of Portsmouth, who has conducted research on wildlife in the area, says: "Ukrainian and Belarussian researchers have recorded hundreds of plant and animal species in the zone, including more than 60 [rare] species"
- Ukraine's state authorities said in 2011 that the area could be occupied within 320 years, while Greenpeace and Chernobyl director both said more recently that it would likely be upwards of 20,000 years
The new pricing model for October CMS is cheap, but no longer open source:
- $9 per project
- $150 for unlimited projects
For comparison, Craft CMS, a popular commercial CMS also written in PHP, charge $299 for a licence for a single project.
[1] https://octobercms.com/blog/post/october-cms-moves-become-pa...