rickboyce

I agree that does seem to be something of a smoking gun.

And it’s not without precedent to secure an injunction against as US tech company launching a new service - gmail was known as googlemail in the UK and some European countries for several years owing to a trademark dispute (https://www.theguardian.com/media/pda/2010/may/04/digital-me...)

But sadly a lot of trademark and copyright cases come down to who has the bigger pile of cash behind them.

(Not a lawyer, but have gained some working knowledge of UK trademarks.)

I don’t think this is totally clean cut. UK trademarks are registered against specific classes and those classes are categorised in families of goods and services.

A quick search suggests that this company holds the trademark for the word ‘Threads’ for class 9 (goods) and class 42 (services).

You can read the definitions somewhere by searching on gov.uk (or somewhere like https://www.russell-cooke.co.uk/media/bmin5fo0/goods_and_ser... [pdf]).

Meta will almost certainly make the argument that they are not operating in these classes or overlapping with the categories listed for this trademark. Class 42 does not seem to apply here, and for class 9 the Thread trademark lists ‘computer software, software and apparatus for the extraction of business information and knowledge’ which may not overlap.

Meta couldn’t also trademark Threads under class 9 (can’t trademark the same word twice in the same class) but just because they can’t secure the trademark does not automatically mean they are infringing on the existing use.

They could argue that their use of Threads as a trademark falls solely within something like class 38: Telecommunications services; chat room services; portal services; e-mail services; providing user access to the Internet; radio and television broadcasting.

If they could land this then there is no claim against them - their use can coexist with trademark’s registered in different classes.

For an app which can be downloaded getting around class 9 could be difficult - so whether they could land and make this stick is far from clear, but Meta have the resources to explore this indefinitely where as the pre-existing user making the complaint may not be able to afford the legal costs to stay the course.

Trademarks are messy and subjective and there is much scope for interpretation - even a seemly clear-cut case is anything but predictable.

Us Brits are very passionate about lovely trees!

I’ve walked along that part of Hadrian’s Wall and stopped at that tree a number of times and it truly was a beautiful spot with real impact.

I don’t think there is any rational significance to the tree - it was just an ancient beautiful tree, standing alone in a very dramatic landscape. A tree that many folks paused to rest at and admire as they walked along Hadrian’s wall (itself steeped in history).

It’s the sensors themselves that have a limited life - the units that have a fixed battery have a battery life that exceeds the sensors useful life.

The common / low cost carbon monoxide detectors use a chemical reaction (either a fuel cell or one of a few reactions that produce a colour change in the presence of CO) - the chemistry degrades with time and exposure causing the sensitivity to drop off over time.

I’m not sure how much of a safety margin they have (like could it still detect dangerous levels at 2x it’s design life or something) but a quality generator would have a life of several times that of a CO sensor at least so replacement will definitely/hopefully be a design consideration.

Quote from the UK’s air traffic controller’s CEO particularly caught me eye - this apparently isn’t some ancient component:

“Rolfe has been asked about delays to investments in new systems.

He said Nats invests £100m a year, and the piece of the system that failed was replaced only five years ago.”

If you want a deep dive this video made by a British electrician is worth a watch https://youtu.be/hZN6hiGLtrE

In a perfect world a ring circuit is a clever invention - it offers a circuit that can safely deliver about 7.3kW with hardly any more copper than normally could deliver about 4.6kW.

However in practice they have a hidden failure mode - if you break the ring they will carry on working apparently without problem except it’s quite possible that you now have overheating cables in a wall somewhere. In the real world houses are full of changes (both DIY and professional) that inadvertently break the ring and it’s not at all uncommon to see in a house with even modest refurb works having been done.

I think the analysis is really interesting, but I suspect it’s quite possible that this behaviour is just a result of optimising the implementation than GVR taking sides in a 2,500 year old philosophical debate.

Both implementations of all() and any() short-circuit by returning as soon as a fasly element in all or a truthy element in any is iterated over.

The origin of these two functions seems to be this post: https://www.artima.com/forums/flat.jsp?forum=106&thread=9819...

Guido makes no comment on empty iterables, but does comment on the final implementation needing to be efficient. It’s possible this behaviour is just the engineering trade off made for a slightly more efficient implementation.

The initial commit of these two functions - https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/96229b191814556622b... - is exactly as Guido’s suggestion, but does include a test case for empty iterables for both functions so we know it wasn’t overlooked.

I think this is sound advice. What I’d add builds on this point:

he does not see the situation as you do

At the moment you may be lacking the perspective of the founder, perhaps the coaching and input they’ve had from investors and other advisors on the direction of the business. I would go into a conversation with the founder but seek to gain a true understanding of their perspective as much as to emphasise your own point.

we unanimously felt that the product works, and the team is amazing

It takes more than a working product and an amazing team to make a startup succeed. The product might be amazing but do the unit economics work? Is there a market fit? Does the market fit scale? Is there something that needs to be hit to secure the next round of funding? Maybe you have this info and omitted it for brevity in your post… but if you approach your investors for a dialogue without a complete understanding of this side of the equation I’d say your in for a rough time.

In legal systems with some basis in English Common Law the idea of an implied contract is fairly common.

Lets I buy some service from you and we sign some one-off contract. The next year I text you ‘same again please’ - you provide the same service to me. A reasonable person would conclude that there is an implied contact to provide the services under the terms perviously agreed. I can’t argue that I don’t have to pay because we didn’t sign a new set of terms.

Or you give me a quote and terms to build a house. If I let you start building it for me (and you can prove that I gave that instruction) there is an implied contract based the proposed terms even if we don’t sign any paperwork.

In the judgement here it seems to be a simpler assertion that the thumbs up in the context of asking about previously sent terms constitutes acceptance.

I think if anything it demonstrates that Disney are playing with a relatively weak hand here.

Disney have a broader problem - they are not the only player in central Florida. Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World is the most attended theme park in the world… but Universal just down the road hold the number 2 and 3 slots.

Yes, WDW is the most attended group of parks on the planet, but Universal are on an epic roll and have a 3rd Florida gate under construction.

It’s not just that Disney can’t pack up WDW and move it to a state friendlier to them. They can’t pack up the critical mass of demand drawn to central Florida either - replicating that elsewhere would take decades.

I don’t think that the Florida legislature are that worried about whether Disney will create however many thousand jobs. They know full well the central Florida tourism market is a juggernaut that’s not slowing down anytime soon and that Disney will maximise their presence in this market regardless of the political climate.

Keeping some corporate and creative jobs in California instead of relocating them to Florida is fairly small fry in that context.

The description of this interaction in the article makes me sad for the author - they criticise and belittle another. Imagine instead what they could have learnt if they opened themselves up to another persons perspective.

It’s notable how little this article actually discusses the delivery of any form of value. The tech is not the end in itself, it’s a means to an end - and we live in an age with so many well matured and valid options that for many of the problems we seek to solve what tech we use isn’t necessarily a critical decision.

The author answers their own question - where have the hackers gone? We are getting on with it and building stuff. This kind of language flame war stuff just isn’t as important as it once (debatably) was. It’s a dying trope.

Thinking on the initial mistake our author made - framing the conversation rigidly through their own frame of reference - I’ve personally found Matthew Syed’s work on cognitive diversity helpful in understanding and addressing this. [1]

[1] https://graphic-designer-richmond.co.uk/2021/01/business-boo...

For analytics work tools like dbt are really gaining traction for this reason.

Most of the OLAP / warehousing stuff I used to lean on dynamic sql for can be done more cleanly, with the benefit of easy source control.

https://www.getdbt.com/

The parent article touches on this point too - both Oracle and SQL Server (and any other major db) supports parameterising values in dynamic sql. some_user would become @some_user (SQL Server) or :some_user (Oracle).

(The characters never actually get escaped with parameterisation - they are not part of the query text when it is parsed so can’t affect it - hence parameterising a value in sql query replaces the need to escape it with something much more robust.)

I agree it’s hard to find reliable information in this - ASHPs and GSHPs are very hyped right now so a lot of the information that comes up in searches is quite low level or low quality. For example I’ve been told that a heat pump is at peak efficiency when it is sized for a duty cycle of 50% but asking why exactly this figure hasn’t yielded good answers.

As I understand it, it comes down to a couple of things.

Heat pumps are much more efficient when providing lower temperature flows, their efficiency drops off significantly where the delta between the heat source (air or ground) and their flow temperate is higher.

When an oversized heat pump cycles it is going to quickly reach a higher temperate and shut off where as a correctly sized unit will cycle for longer. So I guess simply it comes down to having the heat pump operate in the most efficient range for that property for longer vs. short spikes at temperature where it is less efficient.

Most heat pumps have a variable speed motors so they can modulate their output to match a desired flow temperature but this only operates within a range relative to the size of the unit. So if the unit isn’t correctly sized for the required heat output to be in its range then it has no choice but to cycle inefficiently.

A couple of sources I found helpful:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Most of the consumer advice is very low level - this Heat Geeks site seems better that most, but it still lacks enough detail for me to get into the numbers: https://www.heatgeek.com/3-steps-to-maximise-your-heat-pump-...

I’m in the process of moving (back) to a countryside location.

I lived there a number of years ago and split my time in a tech job 2 to 3 days a week in the office and the remainder back home working remotely. It was a struggle - Slack etc wasn’t a thing at that point and the communication was always strained while I was remote. I realised at some point that being remote was going to be career limiting and relocated close to a city with a large tech scene here in the UK. I didn’t resent the move as such, but I’d always missed being in the countryside and the town I’d adopted as home.

Now with the tech scene (certainly here in the UK) having embraced remote working on what appears to be a permanent basis I’m taking the opportunity to move back there and work mostly remotely. Luckily the company I work for has a great approach to this and there doesn’t seem any shortage of other tech companies offering it too. Of course there is always the risk that this will be limiting in the long run, but it feels like the current outlook is on the side of taking that risk. I realised over COVID lockdowns how much I missed living there, so I’ve decided it’s an important move for me personally.

COVID has been awful in so many ways, but a positive coming out of it is the way it has forced some realisations about how we work. For me the realisation has been that it isn’t about having a certain number of days or fixed times in the office - I think this is pretty old fashioned thinking. But instead committing to getting together in person with colleagues and clients for the right activities, where it really adds value.

As a good faith question - if you were an American, how would you create a site or service for a domestic audience without insulting the rest of the world?

First I would say that I don't think I've been, or particularly seen others, be offended by sites that are clearly targeted at a US/North American audience while still being more widely accessible. Usually I am happy that being an English speaker gets me access to a wider set of things on the internet than would otherwise be specifically targeted for where I live. I'd say this is fairly true up until the scale of a company with international presence and operations.

Yes there is going to be some vocal minority who behave in an entitled manner and loudly complain that something didn't meet their personal expectations, but this is a small minority and not representative of the wider English-using-international audience.

If a site is open and upfront about what they are doing then I wouldn't have any issue. Examples might be using geolocation to restrict access or just having some note making clear that 'this service is for X, use it elsewhere at your own risk'.

A good example of this is the range of approaches different sites have taken to GDPR compliance (or that awful cookie law compliance!) following its implementation by the EU and the non-EU countries that have adopted it.

Some non-EU sites (possibly based in the US but also plenty of others elsewhere) have used geolocation to restrict access from the EU, others have implemented those consent banners, others have done nothing. However I don't think it is reasonable to blame a company doing any of these, ultimately we are benefitting from the protections the new law provides - if we don't like the wider implications of that then we need to take that up with our lawmakers, not a foreign company located somewhere with their own set of data protection laws.

The change for me occurs when a company is an international entity. I realise this is a bit of a grey line as to what defines this, but hopefully we'd all agree that FAANG meets this definition. When you're actively engaged with international markets and generating significant revenue in countries around the world I think it is a reasonable expectation that you either: a) make services culturally and linguistically localised; or b) more carefully target a service to some specific regions.

TLDR - at a small scale, if you are open & clear about your intentions I don't think you need to worry about 'insulting the rest of the world' - if you get significant traction in another country you should probably open a dialogue with that user base to understand their views.

For me this effect is significantly compounded by not being from the US / North America. This has come up on HN before (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25226805 ) but it still strikes me as so odd that you need quite a bit of USA cultural / vernacular knowledge to navigate the internet anywhere in the world (or at least English speaking sites?). What a strange view into another country to see each day!

I guess it’s referring to this post: https://www.pentestpartners.com/security-blog/steal-your-wi-...

LastPass recommending https://blog.lastpass.com/2017/03/security-update-for-the-la...

Use the LastPass Vault as a launch pad – Launch sites directly from the LastPass vault. This is the safest way to access your credentials and sites until this vulnerability is resolved.

Two-Factor Authentication on any service that offers it – Whenever possible, turn on two-factor authentication with your accounts; many websites now offer this option for added security.

Beware of Phishing Attacks – Always be vigilant to avoid phishing attempts. Do not click on links from people you don’t know, or that seem out of character from your trusted contacts and companies. Take a look at our phishing primer.

In parts of the world and acre certainly could be a very productive farm.

An example in North America - "With only 1½ acres cultivated in permanent beds, the farm grosses more than 100 000$ per acre with operating margins of about 60 per cent, enough to financially sustain his family." http://www.themarketgardener.com/

I think there are circumstances where it is very valuable - it depends on your target audience.

For example on mobile, connection speeds in major cities in developed countries maybe rocketing, but substantial areas still need to make a lot happen with very little bandwidth. So it can be a small competitive advantage.

OWASP do a decent job of aggregating currently accepted practice: https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Password_Storage_Cheat_Sheet

The 7 minute thing wasn't so much about time (I think that was just the sales pitch) - it was promoting the HIT (High intensity training) school of thought.

Some research is pointing that, for some proportion of the population, short bursts (i.e. a few minutes) of very intense activity is either as effective or more effective than long periods spent in the gym etc.

The big caveat seems to be that response to a) HIT exercise or, b) hours at the gym in general, has a genetic component to it.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-17177251

Too early to tell I guess, but it'd be really interesting to read some meta-analysis on this stuff.

I started with PHP as a teenager, and ended up coding PHP professionally for about 6 years. I'm certainly not sorry for it (:

I haven't touched PHP in a few years (C# and Python for work now) and since really groking a other few languages I've come to the conclusion that, IMO, PHP manages to combine some of the worst aspects of dynamic and static typing to produce an ugly, confused language with gotchas that still haunt me.

But none of that matters - management, directors, clients, whoever care about results and productivity. They don't exist inside of the tech-hype bubble. People want a certain feature set, at a certain cost and within a certain time frame. They certainly won't rewrite their massive code base from PHP to start again in new-shingy-x, when they could be adding more value to an existing solution.

As much as I dislike PHP, I was amazingly productive in it. The systems I developed where way ahead of their competition just because I could iterate so rapidly. (It turns out I am even more productive in Python than I ever was in PHP, hindsight 'eh!)

You mentioned COBOL - there are a world of COBOL jobs out there (this is the first page that came up in Google http://www.jobsite.co.uk/cgi-bin/advsearch?search_type=quick... ) The fact that COBOL hasn't been cool for a few decades doesn't change the fact that there are masses of applications still running it across the world.

In your post you didn't say anything about disliking PHP, you said your scared of yours skills becoming redundant. Don't be - there will be vast amounts of PHP development going on in the world for decades to come, it isn't going anywhere just because the next big thing arrived. It just won't be cool and discussed at length on the internet anymore.

If you focus on being a skilled programmer instead of a coder who only works in PHP then you won't have trouble adapting your skillset. Make a point to really understand how what your developing works and why. When I picked up Java and C# after PHP I was productive in those languages within a few days - they are not that different at all. After a few months you will have learnt the idioms of those ecosystems and be well on your way to being fluent. A great programmer can produce great code in any language, a poor programmer will produce poor code in any language.

I do think it is really valuable to pick up a new language now and again, I always learn something that I take back to whatever I do day-to-day. It sounds like you work in web development at the moment, so maybe stick with something along those lines. Expert Javascript developers are so hard to find, I always find them the hardest to recruit for! It is a challenging language - everyone seems to 'know' it at some superficial level, but make an effort to really understand its idiosyncrasies.

Much more important than anything I've said above - developers have very personal, often very strong, opinions about programming languages. Take them all with a pinch of salt - programming languages don't matter nearly as much as we think they do. Play with a bunch of languages and then focus on a few the few that you really take to - quickly you will find something that you are passionate about enough to want to put your next 10,000 hours into.

We have an in-house XML driven formatting engine to generate PDF reports at the company I work for (we're in England).

The style attribute names have been written in British English - e.g. the colour attribute is colour and not color as it would be in CSS.

Despite being British this drives me crazy! I use the US English spelling all the time (I've been used to it in CSS for 10+ years!) and then wonder why things arn't working.

So, +1 to no en-us to en-gb localisation. This Brit will take consistency any day :-)