veb

I'd say in New Zealand we definitely have them figured out. Every rental needs a heat-pump if there's no fireplace. Landlords will prefer the heat-pumps primarily because it's less maintenance. Apparently 25% of all households in NZ have one: https://www.genesisenergy.co.nz/tips-and-tricks/articles/use...) you may also be interested in: https://figure.nz/chart/HkvN4YjwyylwL2A4

Ours are exactly the same sort of units that I saw in Singapore - they're A/C systems, but can do cold or hot. I remember when I saw the 'heat-pumps' in Singapore, I was like "Wow, why does everyone have a heat-pump" and everyone looked at me and went "What's a heat-pump?" as they always called them A/C units - doubt they ever got above 16 degrees or something.

Oh, I probably should've posted here rather than doing a review on the extension. Sorry!

When I click sign in with Google or whatever it's called, it then redirects me to https://localhost:3002/api/blah blah blah

Would love to give it a go though - looks super impressive. We have an "interesting" code base with a lot of moving parts so I was keen to see whether this helped finding the right part of the codebase I needed.

Excellent idea by the way :)

If it has a radar, then it should have something to do with the sky... hmm, what would be a good name?

I should really re-read Prey by Michael Crichton. Loved the grey goo in that one.

Get this, if you use Edge, with bing as search by default and join the waitlist, then another button appears "get access faster" or something, which then takes you to a page to make sure you've defaulted everything to Microsoft, and you've scanned a QR code to download a Bing mobile app.

I can't be bothered _all_ of that. Mainly the addition of a new mobile app.

I have a cochlear implant so I'm already half cyborg!

Still - I am surprised people aren't building on top of CI research/engineering to do _more_. When my processor is upgraded and I get bluetooth which I'd be able to not have to use headphones anymore during calls and such - I kinda wanna make a "hack" as in have an app on my phone that does some beep beep beep kinda thing when I'm facing north, less beeps south etc and see if my brain starts to know north or south without any aid.

I think I read something similar of someone who made a vibrating belt on hackaday that did the direction thingie and apparently it did work.

Fun times!

they do, they just might be... in a non-talkative mood ;-)

This was a fun read, never knew so much about ATMs until now.

hard agree. then all the choices of cloud servers, learning those, getting up to speed and actually being productive. it's good there's DevOps, but... yeah good luck explaining to pretty much any business without one that they need 'em.

> "Why can't you do it?"

As someone who IS deaf, but has a cochlear implant I have been telling companies for years that it's not only people like me who get use from it, it's people that can read English, but may find oral/listening harder. It allows them to reach a wider audience especially if they have the captions translated. The last couple of years I told people that a lot of phone users for example will be browsing their phone in public and if your video requires sound people will continue scrolling instead of taking the time to watch.

I did manage to get Air NZ to caption videos too, but not sure if they still do. Their marketing person changed years back and they didn't bother continuing with it (for a time anyway - with uBlock and such, I don't see any marketing from them anymore), even though the metrics that came back from the captioning experiment were incredible.

Then I got on an international flight and the safety video had captions for every language... except English. Ha.

If only a senior dev could get a job in which a11y is a priority. It is something I wish to specialise in more so.

I've found with NZ companies nobody seems to care (because there's bugger all legislation in NZ for this).

Here in NZ, when the Christchurch Mosque shootings happened, the Police just rammed the offender off the road and cuffed him... without firing a single shot.

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

Wee video here: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/christchurch-shooting/11195...

Honestly I think our Police do a lot of good. There's some bad apples, there's complaints - but that is normal. Overall, they tend to make good judgement calls (most of the time).

To the defence of the US, sometimes their system does work: https://www.1news.co.nz/2022/11/24/us-jury-charge-police-off... honestly though, shooting a guy in a car that wasn't in immediate danger to anyone else around him (he rung the police originally because he was having a mental health crisis - in NZ you do call the cops if you can) so they shoot him with beanbag rounds, tase him then shoot him six times fatally. A bit over the top...

There's a New Zealand Journalist, David Farrier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Farrier) and I actually subscribe and pay a monthly fee to be able to view what he writes. I think he's really awesome (some will disagree) but I just like him. He also has a TV series on Netflix called Dark Tourist if you're able to see that.

He has a new movie out at the moment that I really want to see, but his last movie Tickled was _crazy_ like... Tiger King type craziness.

So yeah - if I know someone who actually puts in the work to give me quality output I'd pay for it. Just like I do now.

oh mate I so agree and as a deaf person this would be a godsend. way too much shit is in videos or podcasts. please just let me read...

what I find annoying is that (other than HN) most places won't let you claim your username if the person has signed up, yet never posted over years (or even logged in) and places where an account was deleted.

when I signed up to HN, I had a different username. I reached out to admins and they looked at the other account that had been created but they let me have it because the person hadn't logged in since. Oh! I think GitHub did as well. (shit, I wonder if I have mixed up GitHub and HN... I'm pretty sure they're the two that did actually let me have my handle... :x)

> Modern push mowers are junk

They really really are in NZ at least. I saw some at Mitre10 the other day and they were pretty much all plastic, wtf?

Someone local to me as well buys second hand mowers and fixes em up, puts a better motor on etc. Works well - been a very long time since I've touched an old push mower though!

My old man runs a landscaping/gardening/mowing business so I grew up helping mow lawns etc and you're quite right they've just gotten so bad. We'd buy those commercial ones, and over the years they just got bigger, heavier and shittier - breaking all the time. Dad went back to using just basic older mowers and they work just as well.

You're correct that those old push mowers are better for the grass if you don't have the catcher on - which is the reason for some mowers having that "mulch" function (spitting cut up grass back out without a catcher).

my first thought was the movie. but if you think about it, they're talking about killing billing problems so I'd say that's where the name comes from. (if you check out their website).

a name that makes people go "hmm that's a bit odd" is actually a very efficient way to get people to remember it next time they need them.

For me personally I need people's cameras on as I find hearing a bit difficult (I wear a cochlear implant) so I utilise lip-reading to fill in the gaps.

on another topic - do you find that the people you ban actually do email to contest it or do the majority just make a new account and start the same ol' shit all over again?

There is no HN without dang! You're so right, dang is the glue that binds the community and stops it going down the whirlpool of ... crap that so many other communities eventually spin towards!

Good on you for making the effort. The daughter would've been beside herself!

GitHub was working fine for me in NZ. So was Twitter.

Very interesting outage.

A lot of my Australian colleagues were saying a lot of things were down, including all of our websites however me being in NZ, I was able to visit them.

So I do think Cloudflare actually is a bit more decentralised than we give them credit for really.

Just the fact that they messaged here in the HN thread about what was happening, what they knew, and how they were gonna fix it. That's just _awesome_

Kudos to them. I can't wait to see their after report.

Yeah the NZ ones just came back online, https://veb.co.nz/ was returning a 500 nginx error which confused the shit out of me until I visited HN

Seems our DNS was working over time because a lot of the websites that were down for others were working OK for us.

I was a regular in #startups on Freenode (now on Libera.Chat) - which was always the unofficial home for HN (I think). I made friends, acquaintances and so on. When a job came up at someone's work, I was asked if I wanted to apply as I had just been made redundant because of COVID-19. I interviewed well, got the job and here I am.

I've also had a few contracts over the years too, which paid well.

I found my current role on IRC :-) A real company in Australia so I work remotely. Super fun place to work at, and the fact that they listened to my urging for improving a11y (which is a passion of mine) is the icing on the cake!

Jobs, I've found can come from anywhere. It's important to keep a good network of people who know you - on as many platforms as you want. The more you're "out there" and the more relationships you build is the key imo.

You weren't wrong! Reminds me a lot of Gwern's website (https://gwern.net/)

This is such a cool experiment. Anything that involves sound like this is extremely interesting to me (I have a cochlear implant). Maybe I can hack it so I know when people are making payments :D

Is a real word apparently: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/toosh

Teams also has the BEST accessibility (at least for live captioning).

I have not used Google Meet or anything, but I'm constantly surprised by the level of sophistication from Teams live captioning and transcripts. You can be watching it "type" in real time. It'll write the wrong word, but several seconds later (as the person has added more context) you see the word, or even sentence completely change to be more on point! It's wonderful.

I hope they continue to improve that. '

at least we have super good fibre now. I'm on a 2GBps plan! I hear Chorus is even testing 10Gbps... If I'm honest, hyperfibre isn't really that much more useful than just normal 1Gbps.

what NZ did well with their fibre roll out was connecting up all the smaller rural towns (in otago/southland anyway) :D