Hacker News Reader

gm3dmoon Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

TomTom and BlackBerry had great brands, marketing and great software stacks. I still correct the google maps voice when it tells me to take the third exit on the roundabout. It’s “roundabound”. The people who ran those companies didn’t see anybody stealing their businesses either. Yet they are well and truly gone.

https://youtu.be/ATulnxruvhQ

gm3dmoon Jaguar Land Rover to suspend output due to chip shortage

Forcing suppliers to hold 3-6 months inventory is also a clever trick to make one look "lean".

gm3dmoon UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’

Never gonna give you up.

gm3dmoon UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’

I don't think the state of broadband can be the cause here. Banks, supermarkets and even GP surgeries were able to support complex accounting systems or patient records for decades.

Seems like the Futisu team running Horizon decided to reinvent everything badly.

Much of government IT was being given to consultancies like Fujitsu/EDS in the 15 years since 1994. These contracts ended badly: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/1280096810/Why-did-EDS-c... especially for the public paying the bills.

Martha Lane Fox and the GDS pointed out the folly of this approach in 2010 https://gds.blog.gov.uk/story-2010/

They've done an amazing job overall, but hubris overcame them with things like Verify https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.computerweekly.com/news/252...

gm3dmoon Bank of England to explore a potential Central Bank Digital Currency

We've seen this kind of technology in search of a problem before in the UK and specifically with cryptocurrency:

http://www.open.ac.uk/research/news/blockchain-startup-calle...

This was sold as: our bitcoin/govcoin solution will keep people from being evicted from their homes because banks take 3 days to pay. Which if you spent 15 minutes looking into you would find out it's a total nonsense.

gm3dmoon Nassim Taleb: Bitcoin failed as a currency and became a speculative ponzi scheme

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-556...

Burying bitcoin in a garbage pit hasn't paid off yet but given time and patience. Who knows?

gm3dmoon Eric Weinstein Says He Solved the Universe’s Mysteries. Scientists Disagree

“I don’t trust these people,” Weinstein said, referring to physicists at universities. “It’s an entire system that believes in peer review, it believes in forced citations, you have to be at a university, you have to get an endorsement to use a preprint server. It’s too few resources, too many sharp elbows.”

It gives me the Crown Sterling sponsored talk at Black Hat feelz.

Weinstein. Einstein. Now there was a paper writer he could write four papers in a year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_Mirabilis_papers

gm3dmoon Et Tu, Signal?

I believe Moxie to be a person of integrity, therefore I'm happy to wait and see how this pans out.

gm3dmoon Et Tu, Signal?

Free? I pay the Signal Foundation $3 per month.

gm3dmoon Is that ship still stuck?

Smit are like the Winston Wolf of the shipping business. No problem too big to solve.

gm3dmoon Is that ship still stuck?

Typically an empty 20 foot shipping container weighs between 1.8-2.2 metric tonnes (about 3,970 - 4,850 lb) and an empty 40 foot shipping container weighs 3.8 - 4.2 tonne (8,340 - 9,260 lb) depending on what kind of container it is. For example, high cube containers tend to be heavier.

gm3dmoon Is that ship still stuck?

This is Hacker News.

gm3dmoon Is that ship still stuck?

Just get people who know what they are doing to sort it out.

gm3dmoon Is that ship still stuck?

Suez canal is 24 meters deep. i count 9 iso containers stacked high on the deck (an iso container is 2.59m high).

Smit will be making bank on this.

gm3dmoon Is that ship still stuck?

Smit salvage have got this. I just hope they had enough notice to to take their film crew with them:

https://www.youtube.com/c/SmitSalvageTowage/videos

gm3dmoon SQLite is not a toy database

Crazy web scale folks flip from Mongo (NoSQL) to Postgres: https://www.theguardian.com/info/2018/nov/30/bye-bye-mongo-h...

gm3dmoon SQLite is not a toy database

>Once you have multiple clients being developed and running concurrently, and you have production data (customer accounts that are effectively legal documents that must be preserved at all times) you want that DBMS to be an independent component. It's not principally about the concurrent performance, rather it's the administrative tasks.

For my reporting/read-only use case https://datasette.io/ solves the above beautifully.

gm3dmoon Busiest hour ever in the history of Gov.uk 17M page requests just 21 5xx errors

Many of the people who built GDS now work for public.digital who help governments around the world to build these services.

gm3dmoon Busiest hour ever in the history of Gov.uk 17M page requests just 21 5xx errors

You are spot on there. Here is Tom Loosemore (one of the originators of the Government Digital Service) explaining how it came to be:

https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/abfe49d3-f24c-4b93-b8e...

Unfortunately the spend control that GDS had, has been removed.

gm3dmoon Busiest hour ever in the history of Gov.uk 17M page requests just 21 5xx errors

> UK only excels in static .gov.uk serving

I'd put forward Gov.uk/pay and Gov.uk/notify as very successful transactional services that operate on a massive scale. They have been particularly good for local councils who just hook up to Notify and Pay. The parts where security is paramount are handled centrally. It stops councils having to "roll their own".

Universal Credit is a transactional system handling billions in benefits. When the conservative government shut down the economy in March it seems to have coped pretty well:

https://dwpdigital.blog.gov.uk/2020/12/14/dwps-agile-respons...

gm3dmoon Busiest hour ever in the history of Gov.uk 17M page requests just 21 5xx errors

https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/using-progressi...

When a team builds a service using the service manual as a guide so many things become so much easier.

Need to explain something to a non technical manager? The service manual has got you covered:

> Progressive enhancement is a way of building websites and applications. It’s based on the idea that you should start by making your page work with just HTML, before adding anything else like Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript.

gm3dmoon Busiest hour ever in the history of Gov.uk 17M page requests just 21 5xx errors

https://www.notifications.service.gov.uk/

and

https://www.payments.service.gov.uk/

are both open source:

https://github.com/alphagov?q=pay&type=&language=

https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-api

gm3dmoon Busiest hour ever in the history of Gov.uk 17M page requests just 21 5xx errors

https://www.gov.uk/service-manual

The service manual is an awesome piece of work.

gm3dmoon Denmark to cull millions of minks over mutated coronavirus

Perhaps demand for mink collapsed and now mink farmers feel they need to be compensated before exiting the market altogether.

gm3dmoon Denmark to cull millions of minks over mutated coronavirus

Goretex for all.

gm3dmoon A Spectre Is Haunting Unicode (2018)

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-m....

gm3dmoon The survival of the airlines depends on frequent flyer programs

He that depends Upon frequent flyer programs swims with fins of lead, And hews down oaks with rushes.

William Shakespeare, Coriolanus

gm3dmoon Twilio’s Dutch rival MessageBird plans an IPO

https://blogs.dcvelocity.com/dispatches/2018/09/oracle-troll...

Oracle have been doing the trick of having all the taxis outside a competitor event decked out in the Oracle logo. They used to do it to Sybase in London in the 90s.

You know of the competitor and it stuck in your mind enough to remember because who doesn't love tacos.

Larry may be wasting all that money on taxis when all he needs is a taco truck.

gm3dmoon The blissfully escapist comic novels of PG Wodehouse

William Joyce (Lord Haw Haw), an American citizen was hanged by Britain for his "treason". Ezra Pound, poet and fascist sympathizer was interned briefly by the Americans. Wodehouse was probably had good reason to be anxious while his wartime behaviour was looked into by the authorities. I would speculate that he probably had enough connections with his school tie and the old boy network to "get things smoothed out".