colinb

Does your calculator have a reciprocal button? That’d get you to the desired result with only one extra keystroke.

I think your numbers for France are off. When I tried to hire there last year the burden of employer taxes and levies was ~70%.

That wasn’t the part that killed the deal though. My employer’s real worry was around how hard they believe it to be to fire someone who isn’t doing well in France.

How much of the pain in getting an Irish mortgage comes from regulations? I tried re-mortgaging with Avant a few years ago and it was no less onerous than the process with BoI. Same messing about with multiple surveys, 30 page forms etc. And in the end (for reasons) we stuck with BoI.

I run a small home-built NAS (N100, JBOD) and the thing that surprised me* was how much power the spinning rust draws. I would love to replace it with SSDs, but I've got ~20TB and the cost would be insane right now. I'm hoping that something magnificent will happen to SSD prices in the next year or two. Until then, it's 48W @ ~€0.35/kWh.

*because I'm an idiot. I could've read the disk specs before I bought them. I'm using shucked WD MyBook 3.5" drives.

I heard all those names. In IOS (upper case’i’) the v4 s/w forwarding plane talked about tries. The v6 code was sprinkled with radix. Variable tree stride for different address mapping characteristics was my favourite. I was, and still am, lucky enough to work with the guy who wrote much of that code.

Anyone know if this covers foreign earned income etc? I.e. can I, who hasn't lived in the US for many years, make use of the service?

from the conclusion:

"Overall, the results suggest that eye exercises have limited to no efficacy in preventing or controlling myopia progression. Until robust evidence supports their efficacy, available evidence suggests retiring the eye-exercise policy."

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/oct/22/scientists-c... perhaps.

I see that you exclude Azure. Are you dead set against Microsoft? I’m not a customer but my spouse is and she tells me that they definitely support GDPR/EU-only data centres. They’re used in this way by more than one EU civil service.

it ain't ubiquity, but there are BYDs on the streets of Dublin. And very nice they look too. There are also plenty of MGs.

I'm interested in the way covers vary for different countries. Even when the language is the same.

The Josh Kirby covers for Discworld [0] were a big draw when I saw them in Ireland the UK. The covers in the US and Australia much less so.

/u/cstross [4] has written in his blog about how little control an author has over the cover of their work. That's visible when comparing the UK and US version. Slinky sexbot in the US [1] vs galleons in space (or whatever that is) for the UK version [2]

[0] https://www.tor.com/2014/08/25/12-reasons-to-read-and-love-t... [1] https://www.amazon.com/Saturns-Children-Freyaverse-Charles-S... [2]https://www.amazon.co.uk/Saturns-Children-Freyaverse-Book-1-... [4]https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/03/cmap-6-...

Me? Yes I am.

[flagged]

If you’re interested in the history then I recently read and mostly liked The Chip by TR Reid. I’d like to find something more up to date than that. Lots of buzz around Chip War by Chris Miller. I haven’t read it.

I attended a UCLA extension course he gave sometime in the mid-90's. He was clever and funny and taught well. He talked a little about the earliest days of the C++ compiler, when it was mostly horrible C preprocessor macros. It's been a while, but I think he said that he'd worked at Disney on the tech underlying Lion King, the movie, not the show, ride, etc. He was rather pleased with the architecture of a stampede scene; each (water-?)buffalo an instance. I would've liked to spend more time in his company.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10463312 talks about some in real time uses

Anathem. Or, what Neal Stephenson thinks about this.

Nibbled to death by ducks. I’ve been putting off the move to Apple’s password ecosystem for some time. I think it now supports secure notes - though probably not as well as 1p, but from my pov their trajectories are going in opposite directions. Obviously ymmv, Android, walled garden, freedom etc.

Didn't they recently buy Fully, purveyors of domestically acceptable standing desks? Is this a way for them to chase those delicious WFH $/€/₹?

Story time. My first job out of college, working on the port of VMS from VAX to Alpha AXP. This was before it was renamed OpenVMS (Posix team in Italy!) and when Alpha was still a codename (possible alternates for final choice of product name included VAX-2000, and MondoVAX (still my favourite)).

I was assigned to port the Bad Block Detector (BADBLK? I don't remember exactly) to the 64 bit architecture. The 'port' turned out to be change the build files to use the correct compiler and flags. I don't remember if the tool was written in PL/1, Bliss or VAX assembler, but we had compilers (yes, even for VAX 32 bit assembler) for all of them. The interesting part was the testing.

A Bad Block Detector is a piece of software that watches for disk blocks going bad, and remaps them to spare capacity (your spinning rust disk is lying about its size - don't know if this is true for SSDs). It might even try to copy data from the failing blocks to the remapped space if there's time. More modern h/w does this in the firmware on the drive. It's transparent to the OS. Testing this behaviour is... challenging.

Recipe: Test the Bad Block Detector

Serves: millions

Time: A couple of hour elapsed

Ingredients:

- a VAXstation - i.e. a biggish desktop machine that can run Alpha emulation well enough for our purposes. All of its disks are connected on a SCSI bus.

- a 3.5inch floppy drive with a SCSI connection (yes, you read that right)

- a box of 3.5 inch disks

- a paperclip

Method:

Boot emulated environment. Set cross compiled Bad Block Detector running. It watches for 'interesting' disk related events.

Insert floppy disk. Note the Bad Block Detector does nothing (because disk has no bad blocks.)

Take paperclip in right hand.

Take fresh disk in left hand. With pinky finger, push back the sliding cover that protects the delicate rusty surface.

Using paperclip, gouge a few hundred kilobytes of damage into rusty surface.

Replace good disk with scratched disk.

Watch console for proof that Bad Block Detector woke up, spotted the badness, and remapped its little heart out.

Serve to delighted and amazed customers.

Loose billions of dollars, arrange purchase by Compaq, rinse, repeat.

I learned about this as a side effect of reading In The Dream House by Carla Maria Machado. So, while is tangential to this article, I recommend that book for its unusual structure and fascinatingly awful (but allegedly non fictional) story. Awful in the sense of being hard to handle. The writing is lovely.

> For example, in Europe it’s mandatory to send your child to school

No. No it isn’t. I don’t know where you’re writing from but I can tell you that home schooling is a thing in some European countries. Maybe all of them? I can say for sure and I’m unwilling to subscribe to a sweeping statement about a mass of 44 countries. It amazes me that anyone would.

That's an interesting calculation you have there. We wouldn't want something bad to happen to it. My associates and I offer coverage against unanticipated rises in gas prices. We call this prote^h^h^h^h^h insurance.

More seriously, I can see how this might make sense in the US, assuming that US domestic gas production and politicians can keep the fossil fuels flowing, but the calculations have much wider error bars where I live. For me, US$20k over 20 years is a lot of nights not tossing in my sleep while I dream uneasily of tomorrow's headlines.

(I think that) Flimsy ~= less likely to fall down in an earthquake. When I moved from Ireland to California I moved into a two storey (1940s?) apartment apparently constructed from drinking straws and toilet paper. But… a few weeks later the area was struck by a significant quake. Part of the freeway fell down. I was woken from sleep by the building swaying and creaking. But it didn’t fall down.

Try your Stockholm apartment in that.

“Common sense” is, as the young people say, doing a lot of heavy lifting here. You know who doesn’t get saved from their demons? Dead people. Only living people get to improve their lives, find their own meaning, enrich the world with their ideas and work and maybe, maybe decide that they’re glad to have survived addiction.

We could surely save money in short term health costs by executing heroin addicts. Or let them die by withholding cheap clean syringes. But it isn’t clear to me that doing so counts as common sense.

I don’t know why Apple limit the number of timers in this way, but I do know that a single hardwire timer is sufficient to manage thousands of software timers. Look for George Varghese’s work on Timer Wheels if you’re interested. Commonly used in hardware constrained embedded environments.

In a (very) previous life I worked for a company that made planogram software for Windows CE handhelds. This caused me to have a (brief) subscription to The Grocer magazine. We had a contract with Transport For London (TfL) and Cadburys to help update the rather outdated chocolate vending machines in the London Underground - the metro/tube. These machines had no screen, or indeed viewing window. They looked like something from the 19th century. But they did have an IR port. I recall learning the details of the IR protocol ( > 20 years ago. I don't remember its name) with an aim to gathering telemetry as part of the refilling routine.

I got to spend a day following a guy from TfL as he wheeled boxes of chocolate around the stations, with a route calculated to require the least amount of stairs. He had caches in locked rooms in a few stations. What strikes me now is the sheer analogue concreteness of it all. The selection of chocolate was limited by the rather small machines. The machines had power connections but no other active comms. I don't think the IR ports were in use at that time, so everything boiled down to the TfL guy's record keeping on hand-written notes. The route was governed by the combination of accessibility - meaning we serviced some machines in a station, but not others on a different, hard-to-reach, level. We moved from station to station stopping off at the locked-rooms to restock his trolley.

I did get to visit the offices of the chocolate factory at Bournville, which could be smelled from some distance. Dreams of Willy Wonka aside, I didn't even get a selection box, never mind a tour on the chocolate river. Ho hum.

This job was probably the two worst years of my career. I learned for more than I wanted to about layout of cereal boxes and magazines in supermarkets. I travelled a lot - two international flights a week, every week. I nearly froze to death trying to find a bookshop in Montreal. But I learned one really valuable lesson. There are plenty people in the world doing jobs that are boring, even to them, but they don't care because they can make a living, and that's the important thing. I am not one of those people. A job that doesn't engage me is one that I do badly, and will eventually get fired from. I left this job just in time, for something much more interesting, and initially at least, much less well paid and I never regretted doing so. Not for a second.

I believe you. There are racists in Britain. There are all manner of bigots there. Between people who thought I was fair game for being Irish (I've heard all the potato jokes I promise) to those who don't like me for being Jewish, I fully believe there are bigots.

But again, racist compared to what? Do you have an example of a much less racist society? I.e. I'm not claiming it's ok. But the phrasing 'deeply racist' irritates me. It's a fine way to dismiss everything good about the place.

That said, some of the recent stuff in the Graun about black school children being strip searched is enough to make your blood boil.

Compared to where?

I have no dog in this fight. I'm not British. I don't live in Britain.

I am certain that racism exists in Britain. But I don't think I've been anywhere that racism doesn't exist. More to the point, I don't think I've been anywhere with less racism than Britain. I've been to every continent but South America and Antartica. Perhaps Brazil is the utopian ideal you're using as a baseline? I saw racism in India, in China, in Canada and the US, and in my native Ireland.

There isn't much racism in Ireland, but then again, there aren't that many visible minorities, and until recently we've been blaming all our ills on Britain... Oh, bother. Well, apart from the Troubles, Cromwell, the Famine, what has Britain ever done to us?

Pythonic (half-)witticisms aside, I don't think your statement is useful. There are racists in Britain, but my own anecdata is that it's mostly a place with relatively good integration, certainly better than what I saw in the US.

Finally, take a look at the current cabinet. They may be a shower of haters, second-raters, I'll-pay-for-it-laters and the like (Braverman is my current least favorite, but only because Priti Patel on a break getting her venom glands upgraded, but they certainly cover a fair gamut of skin colors. (Though no one of East Asian decent so far as I know)

I found your podcast after a comment here about the episode featuring the guy who built the (Apple II?) app from his cabin in the woods. I’m still a regular listener.