timje1

Multiple countries take the entirety of August off. This is most common in France, but also Italy and Spain. 5, 6 weeks of contiguous holiday is commonplace in France. This is a big enough trend for there to be data.

I've scribbled 'this is satire' across each and every generated ID, so they can't realistically be used for anything.

Nope! Office of national statistics published a CSV for postcode -> constituency name [ https://geoportal.statistics.gov.uk/datasets/6f2f35a9a0b94e7... ], and then the official gov.uk parliament API for a constituency name -> MP lookup [ https://members-api.parliament.uk/index.html ]. So all of the data is the officially available data. I humbly posit that this is a publicly owned bug.

They're definitely not perfect. I wouldn't want them to be perfect, then they might be used for something nefarious. The mock IDs use fake details and fake faces, and don't even attempt to get the watermarks and machine readable parts right.

Yup, that's what happens. If you request a postcode that leads to an MP that's not been seen before, it starts generating that MP and saves the ongoing promise, and gives that promise to everyone else to asks for that MP.

Had to make sure to implement this so that I didn't end up generating duplicates.

Thanks Danny - it was indeed following 'They Work For You' - I'm a big fan of that site.

yeah to generate a photo of reasonable quality it costs like $.18, so multiply that by 650ish MPs and you have a pretty expensive lil parody site...

Because that's expensive as hell and I didn't know if anyone would visit the site..

Yeah the address on all the IDs is for parliament. I assume one could find em there

It's literally just sticking the MPs name into an AI and asking for it to generate a mock ID for them. None of their real data is being used (e.g. their face, their DoB, the address) and the mock IDs wouldn't fool anyone for a second. I'd love if someone who understands the law would weigh in though

Seems like open AI is rate limiting me for a minute, I didn't expect to get top of HN this quickly. Use Starmer's for now - WC2B6NH

it's literally just the MPs name. It's a fake DoB (because their DoB's aren't public knowledge anymore) all the numbers and such are nonsense, the images wouldn't fool a human for one second. The AI tools don't let you generate an ID for any real human being (because that sounds like all sorts of fraud) so you can't upload a picture of the MP or anything like that - so I just let the model fill in whatever face it thinks is appropriate for the given name.

what's the postcode?

I don't think that's as universally agreed upon as you claim. I know of plenty of women who struggled to lose weight via diet and cardio, and then turned things round when they started eating high protein and lifting weights.

Diet + cardio with no strength work can put people into 'gotta make it through this famine' mode, where their metabolism slows right down to eke out the stores as long as possible.

I remember reading a book a while back that mentioned that the luxury shops in airports don't make any money and don't expect to make sales. They're there to make you see Armani handbags for $2500 and think 'Wow, Armani must be a really luxury brand to have $2500 handbags on sale!'.

This then makes you more likely to later buy an Armani t-shirt for $80.

The store in the airport is there to make you think the brand is glamorous, to convince you of its mystique, not to sell things.

We had a similar situation to Troy's where several thousand pounds was charged in a matter of days as a result of our misconfiguration of caching in our azure app services (before that month we typically had around £800 a month costs). We emailed Azure / Microsoft and they were happy to refund us. I don't think this is their intended business model.

Back in UK history there were paid rabbit hunters, who'd roam a farmer's land hunting rabbits. They ate a lot of rabbit. It turns out that rabbit meat is not nutritionally complete and some of them died.

https://fourtallpalms.com/why-rabbit-meat-is-not-the-best-su...

The author misses the driving force behind most of this - Chinese censorship and the money behind the Chinese market. If you're making a modern blockbuster you'll double your take if you make sure it plays well in China - which you primarily do by making it sexless, ensuring that any gay representation is minor enough to be cut, etc.

https://pen.org/report/made-in-hollywood-censored-by-beijing...

I think a big factor you're missing here is that many of the regulations in Europe are around the public's (and workers) rights, health and wellbeing.

For example it's difficult to create a startup in France because it's very difficult to discipline or fire anyone, and tech workers are used to clocking off at 5pm and having 35+ holiday days per year.

This means that no one's creating these epic billion dollar companies in a hurry, but at the same time the populous is defended, healthy, and not overworked. As opposed to the US where often a company's rise comes at the cost of a wealth of underpaid and mistreated workers (Amazon, Uber, we could go on).

To use an intentionally extreme analogy, your argument feels like sitting around watching the US build lovely tall pyramids with slave labour, saying that Europe's regulations get in the way of it building such tall pyramids. Well, yes, of course, the US is better, if all you're measuring is the height of the pyramids. (nevermind that the US is the easily the biggest user of slave (penal) labour outside of China)

It seems like US workers and the US public lose out on almost every other measurement.

There was an interesting article a couple of years back, positing that the years that humans won coincide with unusually warm weather. The takeaway was the humans have a superior cooling system for efficient long distance running, compared to most animal's superior sprinting capabilities.

'"Hate Speech", defined essentially as any form of discrimination whatsoever, has been made illegal in Europe following the growth of the anti-immigration far right.'

Misguided on a number of fronts -> 'hate speech' is defined differently in each country but usually requires an incitement to violence, or direct violent threats, before a prosecution takes place.

Hate Speech wasn't made illegal as a result of the recent rise of the anti-immigration far right, these laws have often been in place for decades and were initially aimed at neo-nazis. e.g. 1986 in the UK. 1985 in Germany (initially).

And "in Europe" is a fucking stupid grouping when it comes to these laws as each country is completely different - what you can do in Romania is vastly different to what you can do in Germany.

What a weird, unfounded bit of vitriol to vomit into the discussion

Look has a correlation to perceived taste. People perceive things to be tastier when they look good.

I often come across South Asian women driving for Uber in London while their kids are in nursery / primary school. Uber's flexibility seems to fit perfectly with a more modern view of labour vs child rearing responsibilities.

There aren't anywhere near enough flexible part time jobs that stay at home mums and dads can do while their kids are in school.

Apex Legends is good for improvisational gameplay that doesn't involve memorising building patterns. Also it's free!

The tactical opportunities in a fight that are available to a team with a gibraltar and pathfinder vs a gibraltar and pathfinder.. huge. Where does the shield go? Is claiming the high ground worth exposing yourself to the airstrike?

Seconding the idea of finding them problems that they can solve or things they can build that they find interesting.

Programming to make their homework easier? Great.

Programming a game they can show their friends, that lets them compete to get a high score? Great.

Programming some interesting scripts into minecraft? Great.

Programming to learn to how to reorder a red black tree? ="programming is boring"

Define 'you'. If 'you' is your memories and personality, then those things are physical. You can take a knife to a brain and cut out memories, you can cut out love. These are tied to your physical meat. If the meat is destroyed, or the currents stop running, then your memories and personality are destroyed. If 'you' is something other than your memories and personality, then sure, that might go on.

The big difference that I remember from gmail was the superior spam filter (other inboxes filled with spam quickly) and better security (everyone with a yahoo mail account had it compromised and started sending spam / virus laden links after a while).

That's not particularly productive thinking: should we test buildings by bombing them - if they fall over, they didn't deserve to tower so high?

The world would be a lot better if a country that detects weakness in another didn't immediately look to exploit this. We can say it's human nature but when we start to talk about 'deserving' an outcome, we start to talk about the world like it's dogfighting.

Yep, when I'm interviewing a developer, if they try to bullshit an answer I instantly lose trust in them. How can I trust their work if, when they don't know something, they just try to BS their way through? Far more healthy to admit they don't understand and seek help / guidance from those who might. Humility is an important developer trait.