tescocles

Is there any mention of what kind of radioactive decay this is powered from? Based on the name, one might assume beta? This would also track with the "research done in the 20th Century" bit considering beta radiation is just electrons.

My point being - what impact does this have on the safety of the device? Any more than certain light sources containing mercury, for example.

My partner's uncle and aunt have a holiday home right on that beach, just down from these pictures. We have of course enjoyed the privilege of staying there. We arrived in the dead of night, and there are no lights on the beach, so finding the house and then the keyhole was difficult to the point the woman next door thought we were trying to break in.

I feel sorry for the people that have to use it to commute every day. Surely their hearing must be being damaged.

I just wish people would remember that they've already told me a story before.

I always get paranoid they'll remember half way through the story that they've told me it before, and then ask why I didn't say anything.

I have always found it amusing that CSS does not accept both "color" and "colour" even though it accepts both "gray" and "grey"

It seems to be taking a while for the framework to propagate to more independent arms of the government; as well as your example, for the (e.g.) DVLA a lot of the top level information-only pages are in the new framework (and also reside on www.gov.uk), but if you click any link to a form you get taken to the DVLA subdomain (motoring.dvla.gov.uk) and the difference is stark.

For the DVLA the site isn't so bad, but I definitely get that slightly disconcerted feeling that something is going to go wrong while you're filling out this important, official form? Which I don't get at all in the new framework.

Not even close.

The specific case I know you're talking about is the woman who was in an exclusion zone that was in place to stop people harassing women entering an abortion clinic.

If she doesn't want "praying silently in her head" to be interpreted as harassment, maybe she should think about the behaviour she and her cohorts have engaged in that might have lead to this interpretation.

Sure, you can disagree with that as well, but she wasn't arrested for praying. She was arrested for intimidation and harassment. She doesn't get a special pass just because of the method.

I don't understand the cult following around Svelte.

What I don't get is how I never (at least on HN) see any criticism of it. Like... never ever. And sure I've probably missed the odd negative post about it, but as someone who has never used it and whose entire knowledge of it is based on what I've read on here, I couldn't tell you a single supposed downside of using Svelte. And sure, it could just be That Good, but... I dunno? There's something off about that.

It depends what you mean by data. Metadata maybe, but I'd think they're meaning that once your passwords data is encrypted (on your device), it is no longer your data without the encryption key?

You can find ones with glass lids.

Here in the UK we're lucky that Pyrex is still borosilicate glass, and there are some I've seen with glass lids that are advertised as "zero plastic".

I'm not really well-versed in this kind of thing to make any particular comments, but this made me rage:

Please reply to this message by 05.10.2023 to let us know that you received it and intend to make the applicable changes.

How effing arrogant do you have to be to say something like this? No "please respond and we can talk about it", it's "please confirm you know we're the big guys, and you're going to do what we say".

I found this to be successful too. It took a few times though because it kept telling me about restaurants in New York.

This wouldn't work in the same way in Japanese because characters can have different readings depending on the context. Could that be overcome with font ligatures? Still, even if we could overcome that massively complex task, some groups of characters (i.e. the aforementioned context) can still have multiple ways of reading them.

I don't know the contract law in the relevant (presumably US) jurisdiction, but surely an asterisk in the contract that's basically:

Lifetime perpetual licence!*

*but we can cancel any time without any penalty lol teehee

is not enforceable? I don't think it would fly in court where I live, it doesn't matter if it was in a signed contract if it's preposterously unfair.

edit: and I don't even necessarily think a lifetime licence is something a company should offer, they are quite unfair on the developer. It's a big commitment to say you'll support some software in perpetuity. But the solution to that is to not offer a lifetime licence. It's not to just outright lie and say you are when you aren't. And if you're one company looking to buy another, you buy those contracts along with it and should take that into account in your due diligence.

I mean, yes, it is a very impactful book; I enjoyed it very much.

What I'm meaning, though, is that if you were to go against your duty as the head of NASA, Carl Sagan isn't going to rise from the grave and smite you for your transgression. Whereas I believe that is exactly the point of swearing over a bible.

I'm not meaning to say it's meaningless to swear over an important book (or that it doesn't make some kind of point), rather that an important element of what it means to swear over a religious text is lost. The whole point of rationalism is that the universe isn't sentient and won't and cannot judge your actions.

An oath is a promise to someone that you will act for the greater good, and you do so with your hand over a representation of who will witness and judge you for that.

I don't really know if I'm trying to say anything in particular. It's just some thoughts I had when reading.

Is there any actual strict requirement that you have to swear over a document of some kind?

I'd have thought swearing over the bible is a stand-in for swearing "before God", and that God would ultimately be your reckoner should you break your oath.

If you don't have that meaning behind the oath, what is the point in using a book at all unless it's something meaningful like the constitution of your country, as another poster has used as an example, or some other relevant document that is there as physical representation of something abstract?

If I, not being religious, were being sworn in as the head of NASA, I'd find it much more poignant to swear over the US constitution, or on nothing at all.

"If you got shit on your fingers would you wipe it off with a piece of tissue, or wash your hands? Why would the answer be different for your bum?"

I don't know about you but I don't tend to touch my keyboard or food with my anus like I do with my hands

I get exactly the same pang of sadness. I even distinctly remember learning perturbation theory. But I use so little of what I learnt, and it's so long ago, that at lunch table discussions I can't even be the "ex-physicist that'll know the answer to that" any more. It fills me with great sadness.

It's not even that I feel that time was wasted - I like my field and I don't think I was suited for the path I didn't take. But it's such a rich and interesting field (physics, maths, chemistry, the lot) it's so fun to talk about. And with that training at least I could engage meaningfully in those discussions when I was fresh out of uni.

Now, not so much. My amateur astronomer colleague knows more about cosmology than I do at this point.

One might assume it's forward thinking - if this were used in Japan, where there are woman-only carriages, this might be relevant.

It's about time to effect change. It's about cross device and platform support. It's about it being easier to find developers familiar with the browser stack then native app developer.

One might consider these as cutting corners - hiring web developers to build an app that really should be native

Since everyone is complaining about the site rather than the topic - I hate sites that hide the menu bar when you scroll downwards but then show it again when you scroll even slightly upwards. If you scroll up when you're trying to read something that happens to be placed at the top of the viewport, the menu swings down unceremoniously to obscure it. There are so many other options, have a button that pops out the menu or have it there permanently (if you're hiding it because it doesn't fit with the design of the page as you scroll, it's even worse that it just appears in front of the content). Having the trigger to view the menu as scrolling upwards a bit is bad UX anyway as it's not logical - there are very very few cases where scrolling should trigger a non-cosmetic interaction with the page.

I like to align things (new paragraphs etc) at the top of my viewport during long reads, so this happens quite often.

Then the RAM state is compared after each frame, to verify that the C implementation is correct.

So not simply recreated, it's a 100% accurate replica of the original game. Crazy.

What, by the way, was the original SNES "OS" written in?

This has to be one of my biggest peeves online. It's such a pervasive tactic to shut down discussion of a topic that's disadvantageous for the "other side". To use a topical example I see pretty much all the time: say there is a reddit thread that has the title "1 in 4 women experience X". There is a pretty heavy implication, and it's there no matter how much people want to deny it, that by extension men don't experience X either at all or to such a degree. Yet, if you point it out that "men experience X just as often though?", you won't be refuted or shown statistics that show they don't, you'll just be accused of "whataboutism" ("what about the men?" - well, the fact that it takes an article like this to start some people saying "woah woah woah... this hasn't been proven yet!!" should tell you something) when what you were pointing out is that aforementioned subtext that men DON'T experience it.

I absolutely despise the word now, to the point I'll cringe a bit even when it's used legitimately.

...close the app then?

It's just a different paradigm. It's not like quitting the app is in any way difficult (it's just cmd+Q which I actually find a bit too easy to trigger by accident sometimes), it's just Macs don't consider an app to be the sum of its windows.

I don't know if this is quite what you mean, but I've had more than one discussion (and seen many more online on twitter, reddit) that goes something like:

Alice: say, for the sake of argument, that A is true

Bob: But A isn't true?

Alice: Whether A is true or not is a different question. For the purposes of our conversation (that we're talking about the consequences of A being true), it is.

Bob: But... A isn't true.

Alice: I give up!

Bob: I win!

For Bob, it seems to be completely impossible to talk "stipulatively".

It's equal parts frustrating and baffling to me that some people just can't understand the concept of talking about logical conclusions from some starting point independently from the veracity of that starting point, and I'd agree it's one of the big issues with (online) discourse today.

Musk is simply roleplaying as a competent businessman, with a side mission of appeasing his bizarre army of deluded sycophants who worship him for being a kooky crazy genius (he isn't). This is exactly the kind of image he thought he had when he swanned in and fired everyone: he thought it made him look like a cutthroat, intelligent businessman; it's simply a coincidence that Twitter does happen to be a bloated, mismanaged mess.

I never disliked the algorithmic timeline, I just disliked the fact Twitter did everything it could to get you use it, including switching back to it after a while without telling you. The second I notice a platform not only being manipulative, but thinking I'm stupid and wouldn't notice, I start to resent it.