Hacker News Reader

time4teaon How a software glitch at the UK Post Office ruined lives

In UK law, it is presumed that computers systems work perfectly, and it is up to the "other side" to prove they didn't.

In short, if the computer said so, it is a fact, in court.

Lots more information here

https://evidencecritical.systems/2022/06/30/briefing-presump...

time4teaon Heat pumps, more than you wanted to know (2023)

It's Intelligent Octopus Go.

You need a smart meter. It's electricity only.

You (and I) get £50 credit with this link: https://share.octopus.energy/happy-frog-559

time4teaon Heat pumps, more than you wanted to know (2023)

(I have a heat pump)

You can get electricity at 7.5pkWh. With a battery, I get 12h of cheap electricity per day, and the rest at higher prices.

At the coldest time of the year, I'm getting an average of 20pkWh.

This is just a fraction above break even gas/electric.

The rest of the year its no contest, heat pump wins.

My energy usage for heating is down by 60% year on year

My bills are the same as they were 3 years ago.

time4teaon New UK record for wind power set today – 21.81 GW between 0900-0930 GMT

Can confirm that in my 1920s house, now with heat pump, my energy use is now a fraction of what it used to be, since replacing boiler with heat pump.

Before: Jan 600kWh electricity, 3300kWh gas = 3900kWh

After: Jan 1580 kWh electricity, 20kWh gas (cooking hob)

So in total, 41% of previous amount, and for heating, 30%.

So yes, for crappy uk houses heat pumps are totally fine.

Adding in solar pv, and a time shifting battery, and the bills are maybe £2k per year lower than they would be.

time4teaon The EPA wants total removal of lead pipes

The figures are for USA only, but you're counting the whole world.

>>> import pint >>> r=pint.UnitRegistry() >>> usa = r.Quantity(9833517,"km*2") >>> h = r.Quantity(35000, "ft") >>> v = usa * h >>> naturally = r.Quantity(0.1, "ug") / r.Quantity(1, "m * 3") >>> natural_total = naturally * v >>> natural_total.to('ton') <Quantity(11563.6821, 'ton')>

Natural total in USA, up to 35,000ft is 11,000 tons, and added is 113,000 tons.

So the leaded avgas has added 10x.

Assuming uniform distribution up to that height, and that it doesn't disappear. Neither of those things are true, especially as the lead is absorbed by people and animals.

time4teaon The EPA wants total removal of lead pipes

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/10/20/2023-23...

> We estimate that piston-engine aircraft have consumed approximately 38.6 billion gallons of leaded avgas in the U.S. since 1930, excluding military aircraft use of this fuel, emitting approximately 113,000 tons of lead to the air.

time4teaon American Airlines: Soaring debt, fleeing investors, and a 90% stock drop

Spent $12b in stock buybacks, now worth $7b, and loaded with debt.

When will companies learn that stock buybacks are a terrible way to spend their money, and in AA case, their debt...

Their debt would be at 50% of its current without that buyback, and its entirely possible the stock price would be unchanged.

Buybacks basically never have the stated outcome of boosting the share price, they just use up all the money, so now your company can't spend it in making itself better.

time4teaon MISRA C

a=a; // silence misra unused

Oh the games, oh the kwalitee.

time4teaon New study finds electric vehicles are driven less than gas cars

Another interpretation is that people who drive EVs are also realising that multi-modal transport is better, so they are shifting their journeys to "non-car".

This is a double win!!

Taking an ICE vehicle off the road, and also, using the replacement vehicle less - so less road wear, less energy used, less traffic, more pedestrians and cyclists and car sharers.

time4teaon AI Company Plans to Run Clusters of 10k Nvidia H100 GPUs in International Waters

Very old idea. People wanted to host trading floors on rigs or tankers in international waters in the 90s so they could avoid tax and regulation. Not sure if anybody actually did it. Possibly due to latency? Or regulation?

time4teaon Large deposit of "white" hydrogen found underground in France

"Hydrogen produces only water when burned"

This oft-repeated claim is incorrect. Burning hydrogen in air produces NOx and other pollutants, and this confusion is promoted by fossil fuel companies that persist in telling us that it's fine to keep burning things.

Hydrogen is great, but burning it is not sensible, be it by itself, or mixed into natural gas.

time4teaon DKIM: Rotate and publish your keys

My previous comment was flagged, but I'm happy to restate.

The author doesn't understand what repudiate means, and therefore all the arguments are nonsensical.

To repudiate means, according to Cambridge dictionary "to refuse to accept something or someone as true, good, or reasonable"

So, when a transaction or email is repudiated, it means that someone is claiming that they didn't do it, despite the fact that it was done.

Non-repudiation is a characteristic of a system whereby a user of the system will find it difficult or "impossible" to repudiate that they did an action in that system.

So when the author claims in a title that "Non-repudiation of emails is undesirable" they are getting the words and meaning mixed up.

It is repudiation that is undesirable, and that's why non-repudiation is such an important characteristic of some types of system.

time4teaon WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

ISTR SunOS4 panic if it saw duplicate IP address on the network.

sync boot

time4teaon Results of technical investigations for Storm-0558 key acquisition

What this means is that the keys are not stored in non-recoverable hardware, they are available to a regular server process, just some compiled code, running in an elevated-priv environment. There is no mention that the systems that had access to this key were in any other than the normal production environment, so we may extrapolate that any production machine could get access to it and therefore anyone with access to that environment could potentially exfil the key material.

time4teaon Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions

Carbon offsets are total bullshit, so really this changes nothing.

Perhaps now they will report their true carbon emissions.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/24/carbon-c...

time4teaon We put half a million files in one Git repository (2022)

We learned they were 70% autogenerated so probably shouldn't have been in git at all, but our build process relied on that, and didnt want to fix it, so we bodged it.

time4teaon “Autobesity”: More than 150 car models too big for regular UK parking spaces

If you drive an SUV in a city, you're part of the problem.

Preferably Walk, cycle, get a bus, get some transit, share a lift, drive a small car.

time4teaon Amsterdam to use “noise cameras” against too loud cars

Have you considered maybe you're in the wrong? The hierarchy of responsibility puts a motorbike above (more responsible) than a pedestrian. Three people is more than one, so you are really saying you inconvenienced three more vulnerable people just so you, a single person, could go down a road, at speed, without a care for others.

time4teaon Spring 6.1 now compatible with virtual threads and JDK 21

If you drink the kool-aid, you'll love it.

It's a tricky question to get a real answer, due to all the vested interests, lack of real research, and differing views of "what is good"

Which is better, Amiga or ST (Amiga!)

time4teaon Postgres Audit Tables Saved Us from Taking Down Production (2021)

aka, we don't do any input validation. Oops.

time4teaon Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?

Google using its huge market share to push a browser to help it know what you are up to. Same as Google analytics, same as Google hosted libraries, Google fonts etc etc. All there to make sure they see you on every site. Why anyone would use chrome is beyond me.

time4teaon Annoying A/B testing mistakes

Annoying illegal cookie consent banner?

time4teaon Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs

Microservices are just an architectural pattern, and like all patterns there are places where they are highly appropriate, and others where they are inappropriate.

Same for cloud, same for <pattern>

If everything is a hammer you'll hurt your thumb/hand/arm.

At least now (for some time) the pattern is named, so broadly when talking about this sort of thing, the name conjures up the same/similar image in everyones heads.

There are all sorts of inputs to the choice of architectural patterns, including budget, scalability (up and down), criticality, security, secrecy, team skills and knowledge, preference, organisational layout, organisation size, vendor landscape, existing contracts, legal jurisdiction ....

time4teaon Ask HN: Is "At which age did you start coding?” a good data point for hiring?

"Years of experience" is age discrimination in a single phrase.

Sure, ask about competency and capability, but not years of experience.

By asking about age you started programming, you may be discriminating against parental income levels, family situation, schooling, gender and all sorts of other things.

time4teaon Ask HN: Is "At which age did you start coding?” a good data point for hiring?

This question, in an interview, seems to be likely to be illegal in many jurisdictions.

time4teaon Cloudflare launches easy to set up consent manager that respects users

How about just use cookies for strictly necessary purposes. Then you don't need to ask, and the Web will become better

It's only because sites are jam-packed with spyware that all these horrendous popups are everywhere.

If you need a complex consent manager, it's a signal that you're doing the wrong thing.

Ads are not strictly necessary, nor visitor tracking, btw.

time4teaon Launch HN: Electric Air (YC W23) – Heat pump sold directly to homeowners

Seems expensive. I just got a ~13kW / ~45kbtu Mitsubishi Ecodan air/water plus new hot water tank etc for £10k (plus £5k government grant)

No details on refrigerant and therefore GWP / F-gas that I could find.

On the plus side (for you!), mitsubishi data/api/app sucks so bad, I can only imagine it is powered by EJB - there is so much potential upside there.

time4teaon Experian is a pile of dark pattern garbage

Hilarious that this is posted on a site - tumblr - that itself is full of dark pattern garbage.

"Open in app" whizzing about "I love tracking cookies" over half the screen.

time4teaon Chicago sold rights to 36k parking meters for $1.2B that generate $200M per year

So much to unpack. City selling things cheaply to sovereign funds. Price hikes when bought by VC for no reason (other than profit) Capture of car-centric infrastructure, which makes it less likely to turn towards zero-carbon or multi-modal space - you can park 20 bikes in 1 car space. and more....

time4teaon Replacing Mapbox with open source solutions

I think you can do this quite easily. Use docker compose to start an nginx and maptiler/tileserver-gl. Use an nginx config to send requests upstream to tileserver and cache.

Download a region file from maptiler, or make one.

That's it.

It's about 2h work, using certbot for certificates.

If you want to create your own styles, it's slightly more fiddly, but essentially it's https://maputnik.github.io/editor/#0.41/0/0

Host on hetzner for €3/month.