IneffablePigeon

I think you're right that this point is often overstated.

It does isolate each service from the scaling _issues_ of the others somewhat - if one service gets overloaded and crashes or hangs then other components are less likely to get brought down with it. In the best case if work is piling onto a queue and the overloaded component can be scaled fast enough even dependent components might not notice too much disruption.

Another advantage is that you can scale the hardware in heterogeneous ways - one part of the app may need fast I/O and the rest of the app might not care about disk speed much at all, so you can have different hardware for those components without overspending on the storage for the rest of the app. I think that's a minor advantage in most cases though.

A sort of in-between house is to have multiple copies of a monolith which are specialised through load balancing and/or configuration values and put onto different hardware, but all running the same code. Probably not that widely useful a technique but one that we've found useful when running similar long running tasks in both interactive and scheduled contexts.

>/reducing/ comf(ortable?) deceleration keeps things running smoother than higher values

This is basically what the dynamic speed limits do on motorways in the UK - if there's congestion, the speed limit is reduced on the section of road leading up to the congestion. It reduces the number of cars flowing into the traffic jam temporarily, which helps to smooth out the overall flow.

I was going to do this when I was a student and the form was so long and convoluted I decided to just pay. It all seemed just slightly designed to stop you claiming it.

I can see your argument, although while £216m is a lot of money it's still a drop in the bucket compared to the NHS's total budget (about 0.2%).

Personally, I think the situation can be improved by more education. I think a fine would unfairly affect the less well off, not only because it would be a much more significant amount to them but because those are the same people who are more likely to have unforseen circumstances that mean they can't make an appointment, such as a job where they might just change your shift with little/no notice.

I think the actual booking system could fix a lot of these issues at most surgeries, too. My last surgery held back 75% of appointments such that you couldn't book them until the day of the appointment. This meant that you could almost always get a same day appointment as long as you called at 8:30am, and also meant you probably had a much better idea of whether you were going to be able to make that appointment or not. People who needed to get an advance appointment could still do so, and would have to wait a couple of weeks usually but that's no worse than most other places. It really did seem to fix a lot of the problems I've seen - I don't know why more places don't do it.

At this point contactless has enough consumer adoption to be the easier option. If you're a tourist and don't have a contactless card you can use Google pay etc.

Yeah - here in the UK most long roadworks segments on motorways have a speed limit of 50mph, with average speed checks. It works remarkably well - I barely ever see anyone speed significantly through these segments, as opposed to segments with periodic cameras where people will speed and then slow down for the cameras.

That study is along a single road in a single city, and only looks at the absolute number of collisions. As it says, one of the main benefits of lower speeds is that it dramatically decreases kinetic energy - but the study didn't take into account how dangerous those collisions that happened actually were. Number of injuries and fatalities seems like a much better measure of "safety" to me than just number of collisions.

I agree. I respect Troy enormously on the subject of security (and making that subject more accessible) but I saw one of his "Hack your career" talks last year and found it to be much too focused on money, along with a big dollop of survivorship bias.

I've never used flask and I haven't used Django for a long time, but I'm not sure what you mean by C# being too "low level". What higher level features is it missing that Java or python provide?

I find I'm most productive in C#, but probably mostly because it's what I use every day and I like the tooling.

As you say there's a few current accounts that will give you decent rates on smaller amounts but you'll have to set up the minimum pay-ins as standing orders (which works on almost all of them, I've had a fair few). You can also do the whole switching-for-bonuses thing which is much easier than it used to be and will give you an OK return but is more work than most people are willing to put in.

However, if you're looking for something slightly better than what you've got now there are currently a fair few 1.5%ish easy access accounts available that you could just dump your savings in and make a fair bit more than you're currently getting. You can get 2-3% if you're willing to lock some up for a year+.

ISAs are irrelevant for most people since the personal savings allowance came in - if you're earning less than £500/£1000 per year in interest (depending on income) then you won't pay tax anyway.

moneysavingexpert.com has excellent round ups of this sort of thing.

> I can't be buying pink or golden earphones

I understand the sentiment here, but - sure you can, if you like them :)

I think it's mandatory that new cars have always-on lights, rather than being mandatory to turn on your lights all the time (if you've got an older vehicle). That's how it is in the UK, anyway.

The whole point of those Switzerland-style fines based on wealth are to make sure that Bill Gates is punished the _same_ amount for the same crime, not more. It's just using a different measure of "amount of punishment" - in this case something based on proportion of wealth/income rather than a flat amount. That flat amount means a lot less to Bill Gates than someone who has $100 in savings.

Having to rely on charities to fix problems in our justice system seems completely backwards to me. That's a workaround, not a solution.

I'm also on a FODMAP diet - I've started bringing my own food in to work because I can't eat what they serve at work on this diet. I really don't see a problem. It's impossible to cater to every possible taste, allergy, intolerance and belief. It's nice to make an effort to cater for as many people as possible, but nobody's forcing anybody to eat anything here.

It is possible to go meat free on the fodmap diet, by the way (although people's definitions of the diet are admittedly inconsistent, and it is tricky). To be honest, meat is one the the things I find hard to eat because it's so often cooked with garlic.

The fact that kids walking to school is surprising really highlights the difference. Growing up in the UK, people who got driven to school were the odd ones (depending somewhat on the area).

If that were true then the charities wouldn't take them in the first place. They're (ahem) not doing it for charity.

Something similar has happened in pop music - because on Spotify (and probably other streaming services, too) a play counts if you listen to at least 30 seconds, there's been a definite shift towards songs that start off with a pared down version of the main hook, or at least start their build much more obviously early on. There's fewer long, drawn out intros (which are normally saved just for videos now).

Agreed, when an app I don't love does this I now go out of my way to always click the "I love the app" button and then give a negative (honest) review.

OTOH if I developed an app I'd probably do the same thing :/

I find that kind of astounding. In the UK you pay a flat fee per prescribed medication, and multiple times I've had doctors prescribe me larger amounts on my repeat prescriptions so that I have to pay the flat fee less often - completely unprompted by me.

This "look at it as a permutation problem and follow the disjoint cycles" idea is loosely what rainbow tables are based on (although I think in that case because of the possibility of hash collisions they aren't guaranteed to be disjoint cycles, which requires extra work to solve).

If you watch the first stage telemetry as it comes back down on the livestream (they don't always show you it, sadly) you can see that actually a huge proportion of the velocity is lost through atmospheric drag. I was shocked the first time I saw it.

Obviously the terminal velocity of the stage is still pretty fast but compared to the speed it starts at it's much smaller.

SpaceX is forced to do the "hoverslam" landings (where the velocity reaches zero exactly as altitude reaches zero) because their engines can't actually throttle low enough to hover when the booster is almost empty. At the lowest power it would still accelerate upwards.

Blue Origin's booster, as far as I know, doesn't have this limitation (not that it seems to cause SpaceX too much trouble).

My perspective of it from the UK:

- $60k/year is a lot of money for most people. Median household income is £24k - and people are generally more worried about whether they're better or worse off than the people they know than in absolute terms. In the UK most good careers cap out at £50-60k - maybe £10k more in London. Growing up, I always considered 6 figure salaries to be out of reach. - It's not necessarily about being _content_ with earning that much. Unless you're willing to move to the US (most people aren't), you have to find someone who'll pay you more than that, whether for programming or for something else. If you're unable to get more money then it's better to be content with what you're getting! - A lot of people I know put a lot of value in work life balance. I have a friend who's under 25 but has already cut their hours to about 75% because they would prefer free time to extra salary. From limited experience this seems a bit at odds with US work culture. - Yes, I think in large part it's down to less VC funding pushing ludicrous amounts of money into the ecosystem. - The recent performance of the £ vs the $ has made a significant difference when comparing to the US.

Best book I read this year hands down was The Righteous Mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion, by Jonathan Haidt.

It's a really lucid and eye opening introduction to moral psychology, and as a left-leaning person politically has made me understand my right-leaning friends more than anything else. Truly enlightening.

When I went in a couple of months ago to do the same thing (_slightly_ more complicated situation - I had two accounts but only one SIM card and had topped up the wrong account), the store manager told me he couldn't help me and handed me their store phone dialled to their call centre (!).

The man on the other end of the phone was totally unable to solve my problem and in the end just gave me £10 of free credit on the account I'd meant to top up. He didn't ask for any ID or verification at any point, except for the serial number on the SIM card. It was a pretty bizarre customer service experience.

Except they’re not storing any device IDs at all, they’re hashing the IDs with a salt that they rotate and dispose of daily. They can only infer movement of a device through the system, they can’t tie that back to any device after the fact, and can’t even tie the same device’s movements together over the course of more than one day.

It's imprecise in that it refers to pollution that is harmful to human health as if it is the only type of pollution. It says right at the bottom of the article that shipping as a whole is responsible for only 3.5 to 4 percent of climate change emissions.

The shipping industry needs to get its act together too but it isn't _that_ significant when it comes to climate change. In terms of sulphur based pollutants it's pretty horrifying, though.

I wrote a little script for viewing the data as a heatmap a while ago, if you're interested: https://github.com/olane/locationheatmap

CSS2 has the concept of paged layouts: https://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/page.html

In Cambridge, UK, we get somewhere close to that with 3 bins:

- Green, for compostable waste (food, leaves, shredded paper, etc.)

- Blue, for recyclable waste (pretty much anything made of plastic, foil, paper/cardboard or glass)

- Black, for everything else

The only things you really have to watch out for are things like plasticised foil and styrofoam. Batteries can be tied to the top of the blue bin in a plastic bag.

It works really well, and you basically just have to know what's recyclable and what isn't (which is usually written on the packaging anyway).

I think our local authority is a bit ahead of the rest of the country on this, though. Most places in the UK still make you sort glass from paper, etc.