jnty

These and other incidents with the UAE recently highlight the troubling willingness with which western states and businesses still jump into bed with the authoritarian dictatorship du jour (usually on the proviso that it has a lot of oil) only to 'discover' years later that they're actually quite unpleasant.

I can only assume that the people who predict that self-driving cars are just a few short years away from universal adoption have never visited India!

Given the likelihood of coincidences like that actually happening, you'd surely end up finding lots and lots of pairs of completely unrelated people that look remarkably similar, with no way of knowing if any of them are actually the same person.

I didn't realise there were any smart radiator valve systems, in the UK or elsewhere, which needed to be plumbed in - do you know of any? I'm pretty sure all of them work, in your terminology, as electrically actuated 'knobs' on top of existing valves.

De/re-pressurising your central heating system and physically replacing all the valves is a task that's going to require specialist tools and probably a plumber. It's also pointless, as there's basically only one standard, so you'd have nothing to replace them with. Replacing the knobs on top is a case of watching a youtube video and spending two minutes with a screwdriver - which is the intent of the design.

What you're saying is broadly comparable to "why would you buy smart lightbulbs when you can just replace the entire light fitting and all the switches in your home?" - except I'd argue that's actually easier for the layman than messing with radiators.

There is a prize in the Tour de France for 'combativity' and it means some competitors end up powering off on attacks that have minimal chance of success, so you're maybe not as far off as you'd think!

Can it be a zero-sum game if you can usually switch 'sides' from driver to pedestrian/cyclist/transit user reasonably easily?

Actual title of the article is "Contaminated blood scandal: We are sorry, says government" - the HN title "We are sorry for giving you HIV, says UK government" is pretty gratuitously editorialised.

Quoting the price of a VPS totally misses the point - the cost is in finding one, setting it up with an environment somehow, monitoring it, making sure it stays patched and current over years and years...

While you're busy figuring out what monitoring solution to use on your VPS to monitor the running all for the sake of a little Python script, I've already set up a lambda function and maybe set a cloudwatch alarm to look after it and can move on to the next thing and leave it running indefinitely. Depending on the usecase I might not even pay a penny during that time, either.

I swear 90% of the hate for serverless purely stems from irritation at the name.

I mean, yes, I guess it is entirely possible for male journalists use a science article to describe anyone's hair, cheekbones and face in a way that wouldn't sound out of place in a holiday novel. It's a possibility they seem to only explore for women though.

> “This is beautiful rock,” said Templeton, running a latex-gloved finger over its surface. Her sunglasses were pushed back over her straight brown hair, revealing cheekbones darkened from years of working outside on ships, on tropical islands, in the high Arctic, and everywhere else her work has taken her.

What a bizarre section. Would the author ever write about a man like this?

This is literally the definition of victim blaming.

Overhead power lines require maintenance too, and getting 100% coverage often involves disproportionate spend on short sections that are expensive to cover and maintain. Getting rid of masts on those sections - or even whole lines - could be a massive cost saving.

Additionally, Germany is a big train tech exporter, and there's lots of unelectrified route miles in Europe and the world, many of which would be totally uneconomical to electrify.

Surely if it's in cryptocurrency it will never be in their bank account?

Unfortunately for them, this is a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand

If it's more expensive, many previous Uber customers will take a 'real' cab, public transport, or simply not travel at all.

Jeremy Clarkson had just assaulted a colleague following several other scandals, including racism rows. I assume they made a judgement that the reputational damage to their existing business wasn't worth it, whereas Amazon needed the boost.

That's an interesting way of looking at the cause and effect. Trains unexpectedly stopping in an expected and inevitable property of all networks, whereas trains exceeding their movement authority is not.

Stopping a train anywhere should therefore always be safe, so the safety failing is with the train behind, not the one in front.

Assuming you see them when you're driving, it's probably the sedentary living that's killing you rather than other road users.

It sounds like your school was run in an authoritarian and deeply unpleasant way. That's sad and infuriating, but I don't think that has any particular relevance to banning an object which didn't exist at the time.

"For poor people, $40 means you can't afford a date night this week. It's never worth it"

That's a slightly naive view of what 'poor' means. Try "can't eat this week."

This is a dangerous misunderstanding.

The issue comes when features correlated with race are used to make inferences. This can occur in complex ways but a simple example, used elsewhere on this thread, is zip code. It might be that people from a mainly black area are more likely to exhibit whatever negative behaviour the model is looking for than a mainly white area, perhaps for the reasons you mention. What then happens is two otherwise identical people in the model are treated differently based on race.

That isn't a particularly illuminating article - is there more information elsewhere?

Surely isn't so much an issue of political bias, but the fact they happily helped circulate an ad designed to provoke hatred and fear through clear falsehoods.

No, hence "perhaps". The meaning and intent of the sentence is entirely clear so I don't really see what good this sort of pedantry does.

Absolutely - it's fair to say that in many cities bikes will often get you there faster (or at least, more reliably) than vehicles at rush hour (and for a lot of journeys, most other times too.)

If I had to prioritise the reasons I cycle to work, speed and cost would come above the other things you mention - although they're nice bonuses.

Why is that a bad thing?

Haven't heard the term before and kinda hoped they had genuinely trained a Stingray fish to track people down.

That's not correct - according to the Collision Regulations, simply being a large ship does not make you "restricted in ability to maneuver." That definition is reserved for vessels carrying out an activity which restricts them from altering their course, such as dredging or mine clearing. A large oil tanker may be "constrained by draught" in a narrow channel in which case it does indeed have right of way over smaller vessels, but larger vessels will be constrained too so "priority over everything" becomes a pretty meaningless concept as everyone will have it.

In open water, large vessels like that give way to smaller vessels when appropriate all the time.

https://www.navcen.uscg.gov/?pageName=def3g_RAM https://www.navcen.uscg.gov/?pageName=def3h_CBD

I guess - but I feel like you'd call it an "error" rather than a "smell". Better to just teach people data structures rather than which constructs they should be afraid of. Approaching it "sideways" like this just leads to people going "I heard that loops can be bad, so I copied and pasted that line 25 times instead".

At the risk of sounding arrogant, isn't this a bit obvious?

To me, code smells are more about spotting when someone's been forced to do something a bit weird and convoluted. It's possibly the cleanest solution available given the immediate context, but this is actually a symptom (or "smell") that something is wrong with the wider design of the system.

This article seems more about detecting choices around data structures which are bad in any context and have no real link to the overall system design.

It is unfortunately very possible for a driver to be asleep, texting or just to make a massive misjudgement. As you say, crossing situations are some of the most dangerous on a bike, but there's no reason why a properly designed bike lane junction need be more dangerous than a normal road junction. In fact, intuitively, general road junctions are more dangerous as drivers are looking for other road vehicles, rather than bikes, and can very easily miss them. If you're going to continue making this argument, I'd root it in stats - show me a place which has no cycling infrastructure yet which is safer than Copenhagen or Utrecht.