desas

HN is owned by Y Combinator. Two of the founders live in the UK.

Oh thanks for clearing that up, I misunderstood on my previous read.

The same thing applies in the US doesn't it? There has essentially only been two political parties (three if you squint hard enough) for nearly the entire existence of the country?

The US constitution is very similar, except in two important regards: amendments require two thirds majority votes in both houses and ratification by 75% of the states.

We don't have the state mechanism. You could argue the four nations could serve a similar purpose, though there's a debate about how democratic that is when England makes up something like 85% of the UK population (and doesn't have its own legislature).

To "fall foul", i.e. be required to add highly effective age assurance, there's a number of tests you have to pass

One of the tests is:

Are there a significant number of children using the service or is the service likely to attract a significant number of children.

I'd guess that HN would be in scope for the act overall - they provide user-to-user functionality and have a lot of users in the UK. Either they answer no to the questions above, or they answer yes and should have performed a risk assessment where they look at things like what kind of content is allowed, how the site is moderated, how do users contact each other etc etc.

The childcare voucher scheme closed to new entrants in 2018.

Terminating a train and turning it around takes a lot of space, space that is usually unavailable in a city center.

This doesn't happen in London in my experience. Trains don't turn around, instead every train is double-ended. The driver gets out of the cab at the terminus, walks to the other end of the train and gets in the other cab. They can do it faster than the passengers disembark.

Is there a reason you couldn't build new light rail trains to a higher level of crashworthiness than they are currently? I don't know the full details, but that's how tram-trains in Sheffield, UK were allowed access to the main railway network.

We're drunk on the ease of implicitly painting people who can't read as much as us as simply dumb modern westerners.

I'm not sure we're doing that. That's certainly not my intention. I know and respect many people who read zero books per year.

I think what we're doing is showing surprise that reading ten books per year is seen as a flex or is worth lying about very publicly, and demonstrating (albeit unscientifically) that it's not that unusual.

This is a ludicrous take. I was on vacation last week and read three books, albeit not weighty novels. I can't remember when I read as few as 10 novels per year. I'm not a CEO, but reading is also far from my only hobby.

V5Cs have been online for 3-4 years now.

You still have to send back your cut up old driver's license, though I have my doubts that someone is sat there checking and cross referencing each one they receive.

Strong is relative. The regional differences in my generation (40) and younger mostly come from accent and not from the vocabulary, whereas for my parents and grandparents it would be both.

There is still local vocabulary: nesh, mardy, cob, duck being obvious answers, but more of it is dying out: tuffee, sile, causie.

For perspective, the family - currently headed by the 12th duke, were estimated to be worth £910 million in 2024. They are not out of the top echelon, and are now structured much better for avoiding inheritance tax, which is also at a lower rate now.

There were 100s of Newcomen engines throughout Europe which were mostly used to pump water. They were being deployed ~50 years before Watt improved the design.

People were doing this in the days of printed phone books. There would be an "AAA Plumbers", "ABC Taxis" and so on.

Reputedly, "Apple Computers" coming ahead of "Atari" (Jobs' ex-employer) in the phonebook was one of the reasons for Apple being Apple.

Not at all. It means that the UK police can compel you to turn over your decryption keys if it is deemed necessary and proportionate to prevent or investigate a crime.

If instead, I would otherwise be wasting time playing video games or watching TV, then it always makes sense to do the job yourself.

It depends on how much you value your free time and how much you enjoy fixing your washing machine. I spend five days working, I get two days for the weekend. The weekend days are scarcer and more valuable to me - I'm not going to give them up at the same price I give up a weekday.

Given a choice between fixing my washing machine myself and paying a repairman to fix it while I enjoy some hobby time, well up to a certain cost, I'd rather relax with a hobby.

You're probably right. I just pulled it from https://www.rightmove.co.uk/house-prices/zone-2-93814.html without too much thought.

Still, a £1.3m house isn't completely infeasible in London :-).

I'd put less blame on London and more on secondary cities

HS2 is cut short because of money that people outside of London demand be spent on making it so expensive on a per-mile basis.

I'm not sure that's accurate. Cost overruns have also come from inability to find efficiencies, high inflation in the construction sector, low contingency estimate (half cross rails) and a misunderstanding of ground conditions.

The expense increases due to consultation / public demand have come from demands made on the route between London and Birmingham. For example the Chiltern tunnel extension. There aren't many cities in that gap, and most of that area is London facing rather than Birmingham or north facing.

HS2 between London and Birmingham has the worse cost:benefit ratio of the whole initial plan, and yet it's the only bit being built.

the boundaries of the original private railway companies (GWR, LNER, LMS, SR)

Minor point, though maybe less minor in context of the original post. They are not the original private railway companies. They are the companies created in the 1920s by the London government as it forced railway companies together after it had took them under state control during ww1.

The original private railway companies were originally primarily northern companies, some of who eventually developed mainlines to the rich south eastern markets.

A £1.3 million house in London on a 10% deposit and a 4.7% interest rate over 30 years would be £6094 per month.

The average price for a terraced house in london zone 2 is £1.7 million

now it's been found that a majority of Brits receive more in benefits than they contribute in taxes

This has been the case for decades. It's not news.

Octopus are already doing this in the UK,so it does actually happen.

The new builds are made of brick and block, and are indeed insulated really well. It's the millions of older houses, particularly Victorian ones, that are made of brick, are not usually insulated well, and are often intentionally draughty.

They can't even speak freely about the horrible crimes being committed in their nation by grooming gangs.

Unsure what exactly you're referring to, which might be ironic, but there's lots of news reports about grooming gangs, as well as the surrounding controversy and debate around ethnicity and political correctness see: https://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=grooming+gang&d=NEWS_PS

It's not on the UK taxpayers dime, quite the opposite. The higher fees that international students pay are used to subsidise the costs of educating UK students.

Stack overflows moderation made it, and it will also kill it.

There's something about software that attracts people who interpret rules for humans as something to be interpreted by computers rather than people.

Absolute word Vs rough guidelines.

Build more bike lanes.

To an extent, it's a self-solving problem. If you have great non-car transport options and an increase in traffic makes car driving less appealing, then more people will use those non-car transport options rather than joining the queue.

It's not necessarily the jelly shot, and day drinking is far from unusual in the UK.

The idea of an official organised parents weekend where you turn up at uni to party with your kids is a bit cringe. YMCA or not.

Here it's simpler, you fill out the form on your phone, take a picture on your phone and then the passport arrives in the post. Then you eventually sign it after a bored border official passes comment.