Hacker News Reader

mattdoughtyon What's Inside the EU Green Pass QR Code?

I have decoded the UK QR code (though not using this code). It conforms to the same standard.

mattdoughtyon Home Office Projects Series: Air conditioner setup

I used to live in a flat (I guess you would call it a condo in the US) with heating provided by the building. My landlord who I lived with left the heating on 24/7 during the winter and the flat would get ridiculously hot. Even though he was the one paying for it indirectly through service charges. This arrangement is becoming quite common for new build flats in the UK but I would actively avoid if I was looking to buy.

mattdoughtyon The Decline of the American Laundromat

When I lived in the US, the lack of in-unit washing machines was quite unexpected. I had to pay $2 to use the shared (between 2 apartments) machine even though we as tenants paid the electric and water bills.

mattdoughtyon Hacking Voting Machines at Defcon

With a pen mark you can just cross out the mark and put your X in another box. That would be accepted here in the UK at least.

mattdoughtyon First China-U.K. Freight Train Departs as Xi Seeks to Lift Trade

When I crossed the border on a passenger train from Poland to Belarus and from Mongolia to China, the train went into a warehouse where the compartment was lifted and new bogies slid underneath. All while the passengers remained on the train

https://www.flickr.com/photos/mjdoughty/8502710543/

mattdoughtyon In San Francisco and Rooting for a Tech Slowdown

I get that it may be demeaning but that analogy doesn't really work. It would be like the NYC Subway didn't go to Wall Street at all, and the banks built their own subway for their workers which ran from an NYC Subway station.

mattdoughtyon Djangae – Run Django on Google App Engine

Djangae lets you use the Django ORM with the Datastore, meaning you don't have to use NDB. It also has lots of other helpers for things like deferred tasks.

The Django NDB middleware written by Google, as far as I can work out, just makes sure that writes are flushed. You still have to define and query your models using NDB syntax.

mattdoughtyon New Tube for London

Northern line trains on the Charing Cross branch only go south of Kennington at peak times. This is shown on the map of the Northern line but not on normal Tube maps.

mattdoughtyon Poll: Was one of your parents a programmer?

No option for both parents :) although my mum hadn't done it for years when I was starting out. I wouldn't say either of was a mentor though, I learnt by myself.