ipsi

As far as I understand, it means something more along the lines of "This laser hits the fuel with 1MJ of energy which ignites it, but it took us 100MJ of energy to make that happen, because the laser is inefficient/only 20% of the laser hits atoms/etc, etc." Step 1, in this case, is producing more than 1MJ, and Step 2 is producing more than 100.

In the EU Working Time Directive, it differentiates between the concept of "On Call Duty" and "Standby Duty," where the former is what this post is about, and the latter is generally reserved for when an employee is required to remain on the premises of their employer (e.g., being on-site overnight to immediately respond to emergencies). The primary difference is that On Call does not count as working time unless you get paged, whereas Standby Duty does count as working time, even if nothing happens. Within the EU, that means that Standby Duty counts against working hours allowed by the EU Working Time Directive and does not count as rest - e.g., the German Arbeitszeitgesetz limits workers to 10 hours per day (hard limit), and requires 11 hours between working periods (some exceptions that I don't believe are relevant here).

However, according to recent ECJ decisions[1][2][3], "Standby Duty" is not reserved exclusively for when the employee is required to remain on-premises, and it also depends on the degree to which the freedom of the employee is curtailed, specifically stating in one ruling[2]:

> ...

> 32 In the third place, and as regards more specifically periods of stand-by time, it is apparent from the case-law of the Court that a period during which no actual activity is carried out by the worker for the benefit of his or her employer does not necessarily constitute a ‘rest period’ for the application of Directive 2003/88.

> ...

> 36 Second, the Court has held that a period of stand-by time according to a stand-by system must also be classified, in its entirety, as ‘working time’ within the meaning of Directive 2003/88, even if a worker is not required to remain at his or her workplace, where, having regard to the impact, which is objective and very significant, that the constraints imposed on the worker have on the latter’s opportunities to pursue his or her personal and social interests, it differs from a period during which a worker is required simply to be at his or her employer’s disposal inasmuch as it must be possible for the employer to contact him or her (see, to that effect, judgment of 21 February 2018, Matzak, C‑518/15, EU:C:2018:82, paragraphs 63 to 66).

And while I'm very definitely not a lawyer, I think it's possible (likely, even) that having to be at a computer and working within 5 minutes of a page, even at 3AM, would constitute significant constraints on the worker and turn it from "On Call" to "Standby Duty", although the exact implications of that will vary from country to country.

All of that to say that I think that 5 minutes is absolutely bonkers as an expected response time. If I were subject to that, I wouldn't be able to leave my apartment for the duration I was on call - it takes me a lot more than 5 minutes to get to and from the supermarket or even the coffee place just outside. Even taking out the trash could take > 5 minutes (and with no cell reception, due to being underground).

[1] https://home.kpmg/xx/en/home/insights/2021/03/flash-alert-20...

[2] https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf;jsession...

[3] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

[4] (WARNING: auto-download PDF) https://ec.europa.eu/social/BlobServlet?docId=6474&langId=en

Well, Google is explicitly listed (about halfway down) as paying a percentage, and they're the only ones that are. In my (very limited) experience, it's generally been a flat rate regardless of salary, so I'd go the other way and believe that the majority do, indeed, do that.

Your second point is definitely a major concern, though - the author talks about it (calling out Amazon and Twilio as particularly bad), but doesn't provide any sort of hard data on what the workload is like, possibly because it varies heavily even between teams or groups within the same company.

What noise? I've been living in an apartment for three and a half years and the noise is really not a big deal. The primary issue is being quite close to a busy-ish street, which can be annoying with the windows open. With the windows closed, it's basically a non-issue. And when I do hear my neighbours, it's heavily muffled and just turning on the TV is enough to drown it out.

Yes, older buildings can have terrible sound insulation, but modern apartments are well-built and you won't hear a thing (at least in Germany, and in my experience).

Maybe Runtime or Runtime System is a better word than VM? Go has _something_ that manages Go routines and GC and so on.

Surely that's the responsibility of the providers, though? Apple can improve the situation a bit, maybe, but you'd really need to get AT&T & co to crack down on it to have any chance of solving it for good.

I know that I've had approximately zero spam on my German number (that I've had for ~2.5 years) - I'm sure why, whether I'm just lucky, or whether it's much more under control here. My UK number definitely had problems with spam, though. Maybe a couple of spam calls a week.

Well, this article is a hypothetical, but fire-proof safes are, like anything with "proof" in the name, not fire-proof, merely fire-resistant. It's theoretically possible for a lightning to strike in the worst possible place and trigger an unusually hot fire, one that exceeds the maximum tolerance for your safe. House fires can apparently hit 1500F, and if you've cheaped out on your safe then you might be in trouble (e.g., the Amazon Basics Fire Safe "can protect your belongings at 1200 F for 20 minutes").

I dunno - I always assumed that London-proper prices (i.e., not Milton Keynes) being so outrageously high, upwards of £1,000,000, would throw out the average. Though perhaps the number of slightly cheaper apartments brings it back down again (although of course statistics can't tell you that's because the apartments are the size of a shoebox).

Plus as I understand it, a bit further north you could probably start getting a decent house for £300,000 or less. And in really out of the way places, under £150,000. Trying to talk about "average" house prices in most countries is generally a bit daft IMO because the range between "remote little country town" and "centre of the largest city" is vast.

That's not correct. I suspect that the source you saw said:

> As of 2017, the average annual real disposable income of Dutch households was roughly 31,500 euros.

Disposable household income would be, at a minimum, after tax, and possibly after accommodation. You'd want to increase that by about 60% to account for tax/etc, which would be 50.4K. That seems more reasonable to me, and would put the multiplier at 7.7.

Not sure about the UK - that could very well be accurate, but London throws averages completely out of whack.

That's a very reasonable response. I'd add another thought: A site (e.g., Twitter) could define "off-topic" as anything that goes against its Terms of Service or Code of Conduct (CoC), which would probably result in exactly where we are now. Same problem with a lot of similar ideas - "Spam? Anything that violates our CoC is spam"; "Degrades the experience for the user? We feel that violating our CoC degrades the user experience"; and so on. Not a problem easily (or even able to be, IMO) solved.

I wonder if you've thought this through properly. I suspect that, if your vision were to be enacted, there would be no more forums. No more Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Hacker News, niche PHP forums, comment sections, etc, etc. Why? Because they'd devolve into spam and/or people arguing past each other. For example, given your current definition I believe it would be acceptable for someone to write a script to post useless replies to every single Hacker News post and comment, effectively rendering the board useless.

Right now, HN has the right to delete those. If it was a common carrier, it would presumably not. Arguably they're spam, but I cannot imagine a way you can define "spam" that is narrow enough to not be redefined by everyone as "things I disagree with", but broad enough to capture someone posting excessively to a forum. Note that this wouldn't violate the CAN-SPAM act because it's not advertising anything commercial.

Let's say someone writes a blog article. They publish it on Wordpress with a bunch of unoptimised defaults. Some time after, someone comes along and says "Hey, the search engine will rank your post more highly if you include the name of the post in the URL instead of just having it be blog.example.com/posts?id=1234", so they change the URL. Is that SEO? Should that result in the site being de-listed/banned? It doesn't meet your definition of "provide website content that is more relevant/interesting for the viewer".

And where is the line between "provide website content that is more relevant/interesting for the viewer" and SEO? If I realise that (to take an example from something found on Google) I could take the sentence "Identify the best customers and convert more" and rewrite it as "Marketing automation helps you identify the best customers and convert more", is that SEO because I'm intentionally adding a keyword, or is that making the content more relevant to the user by being more explicit in what I'm saying?

> Putin has a doomsday device that he doesn't actually want to use.

I'm not so sure about that. I feel it depends on whether Putin still has at least some marbles left. If he does? Yes, he realises that leaving a legacy of "war criminal who nuked Ukraine" isn't actually what he wants so the threat of nukes is making a point to NATO to stay out of it. If he's lost all his marbles, though, or if he's so far out of touch with reality as makes no difference? I could see him nuking Ukraine out of spite if it's clear he won't get what he wants, in a sort of "If I can't have you, no one can!" move. Assuming that there isn't a coup before that, or that him giving that order doesn't trigger a coup, etc, etc.

One of the perils of working in the UK is _assuming_ that you've been using UTC timestamps this whole time, and then summer rolls around and suddenly a bunch of tests start failing, and all your production logs are an hour out because you were wrong, and actually used local timestamps everywhere. Oops.

You're sort of forced to handle them, in that if a function returns (Data, error), you need to assign the error to a variable (or do data, _ := func(), but at least that indicates you're intentionally ignoring the error), and since Go treats unused variables as a compile failure, you might as well check them properly. But there's nothing that says you must check them, no.

I believe the US is one of 7 countries in the world that _don't_ have minimum vacation days (although I believe individual states could/do have their minimums?).

The others are (per Wikipedia):

* Kiribati

* Marshall Islands

* Micronesia

* Nauru

* Palau

* Tonga

That said, your ability to actually _enforce_ your right to minimum holidays is going be pretty variable.

Eh? It's definitely done in practice, and at some places it's the default, done all the time.

Adaptive Cruise Control is wonderful - I recently did a long-distance drive across Europe (~1000KM), and I swear I went through 100KM of roadworks. Adaptive Cruise Control would have been amazing for that (plus the other traffic jams caused by accidents/etc).

I have seen a good implementation of blind spot monitoring, in a VW, where it was just a simple light on the appropriate side mirror. Unobtrusive, but obvious enough that you're unlikely to miss it.

The most recent car I drove (a Ford Mondeo, I think? It was a rental) had a number of those but I never really noticed them. The only time it beeped at me was when it thought I wasn't braking hard enough to avoid ramming the car in front (oh, and the proximity alert).

The reverse camera and related sensors were really useful because (a) I don't drive an awful lot, renting a car maybe once a year, and (b) because I only rent cars, I don't know them well enough to know if I'm gonna get through a gap or turn a tight corner, so having something that beeps at me to say I'm close to a wall is handy.

If I was driving the same car every day, some of these features would probably be a lot less relevant.

It's super-handy, but I don't own a car (and try to rent cars with CarPlay when I do drive), so I only ever use it when walking. And there it's really nice to be able to pull up my watch, double-check the street name - because Siri will have butchered it - and so on, without having to take my phone out of my pocket.

Isn't that literally impossible, because there are so many different things that a subset of people need to avoid eating? e.g., if you have a nut allergy, your healthy diet can't include nuts; if you're lactose-intolerant your healthy diet shouldn't include lactose; if you have coeliac disease, your healthy diet can't include gluten; if you have IBS your healthy diet shouldn't include anything that triggers it (which is different per person); if you have diabetes (type 1 or 2) your healthy diet can't include sugar; etc., etc. And god forbid you have 2 or more dietary issues...

Plus different activity levels make different diets healthy - if you're a professional athlete needing 6,000+ calories per day, "healthy" for you is very different to healthy for me, who sits at their desk all day.

This isn't even accounting for personal preferences like being vegan, or religious restrictions.

The one counter-example I can think of for that is https://forums.rpg.net - it's quite a large community, and has been around for something like 20 years. The moderators are very active in the forums themselves, and they've learned from their experiences over time. It's not perfect, but as the community is still large and thriving, even in the Reddit/Facebook/Twitter era, I'd say they're doing a good job.

Which would almost certainly have required different actors, given the 25 years since the original release, and I imagine that would have cause a huge uproar in addition to being fairly expensive.

Maybe browsers should looking at adding a "create account" API or something? Similar to "Login with Apple ID", but instead password managers could hook into it and create an account semi-automatically. This could also allow automation of "user+sitename@domain.com"-style rules.

I know that creating an account isn't adding _much_ friction, but there is some and I could see myself appreciating this.

Yikes. Even in Germany, which is probably the most expensive EU country for mobile plans (yay...), and using the most expensive carrier (Telekom DE), it's €39.99 (CA$58) for 6GB, €49.95 (CA$73) for 12GB, €59.95 (CA$88) for 24GB, and Unlimited for €84.95 (CA$125). Plus you can get additional SIM cards (for an Apple Watch or an iPad, for example) for €4.95 (CA$7.27)/month.

> it is almost always is something I don't want, already have, or just bought.

The explanation I have heard for the "just bought" scenario (I heard it on the internet, so grain of salt and so on) is that they're looking to catch people who purchased the item but have returned it, and are now in the market for a different version of the same item (e.g., you returned the chainsaw because it was too small, and now want a bigger one). Which makes sense, but whether there are enough people in that scenario to be worth the cost...

Interestingly enough, my employer has gone the opposite way - they're "shutting down" (that is, chose not to renew the lease for) our office in this city, and had all of us sign new WFH contracts. Same for the office in another part of Europe.

Some of us were 100% OK with that, and some were really not - since the job wasn't expected to be a WFH job, not everyone has a good location to work from, or reliable internet, etc., etc - those people have been able to work from the office at various points over the last year as the pandemic ebbed and flowed. As a consequence, my employer has walked the office closure back a little - we're still all full-time remote, but there will be a smaller office available for e.g., project kickoffs, or people who want to get out of their house for a bit.

Are... you sure about those numbers? That would be one interview per ten thousand applications, and one offer per million applications. I know you have to submit a lot of job applications, but, uh, that seems excessive!

Yes, I'll ask a few friends to help load my stuff into a van. Then onto a ship. Then they will, out of the goodness of their hearts, spend 30 - 60 days on the ship while it sails around the world, help me unload everything onto a van at the other end, drive potentially five hundred miles or more from the port to the final destination, unload everything, and then finally travel back home. Easy! And I know I've never sailed a ship in my life before, but how hard could it be to sail a ship 15 thousand miles?

And before you say "Well, just sell it and re-purchase it!", I personally have so many items that I want to keep that are not re-purchasable, either due to being out of print, or due to being limited edition, that they would never fit into the checked baggage allowance I'd get on a plane.

On the other hand, somewhere in the region of 10-15%[1] of the UK population is dyslexic (I'd expect that to be similar in any English-speaking country), so exclusively-written communication will be somewhere between "unpleasant" and "awful" for them.

That, and people will start judging on grammar, ability to spell, word choice, etc, etc. I think you'd just be trading one set of prejudices for another.

[1]: https://www.cache.org.uk/news-media/dyslexia-the-facts

It's €650 for the all-products pack for an organisation, or €250 for an individual, dropping to €199 in the second year, and €150 in the third+ year, which probably explains it.