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urban_winter

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London-based software engineer.

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Yes!

Ask anyone with 30 years in the industry whether "agile", for all its problems, was a force for good or bad, and the answer will be an emphatic Good!

If nothing else, it gave us ammunition to argue against the impossibility of delivering a fixed thing in a fixed amount of time - which was the universal view from senior stakeholders of what competent software delivery looked like.

Eat Real Food 7 months ago

and people strongly prefer the taste and texture.

...and _people in the USA_ strongly prefer...

Although, I don't know how solid the evidence for even that statement is.

I am puzzled that the media is widely reporting that the issue was caused by solar radiation, and that the immediate fix is to revert to the previous version of software for the ELAC (Elevator Aileron Computer). The only explanation that seems to fit with the narrative is that the newer version of software has weaker memory integrity checks than the older version - which seems unlikely.

e.g. "For the majority of affected jets, Airbus prescribed a software rollback to a previous, stable version" - from https://www.wionews.com/photos/-pitched-downward-on-its-own-...

If you're in the vicinity of the road called London Wall (where the car park referenced in the article is) then it's only a short walk to London's Roman amphitheatre [1]. It doesn't seem to be very well known but is quite impressive. It's one of very many bits of Roman history entombed in basements of London buildings.

The Merrill Lynch Financial Centre also has a big chunk of Roman stuff in the basement - but there's no public access and no access to the walkway around the ruins even if you're an employee.

[1] https://www.thecityofldn.com/directory/londons-roman-amphith...

[dead] 10 months ago

You don't need a removable wheel to sharpen a pizza cutter on a stone. That's actually pretty clear from the video showing the sharpening of the removed wheel - the fact they the wheel is not in the handle isn't material to the sharpening action.

Pizza cutters wear out by deformation of the hole in the middle of the wheel (in my experience). I have thought of hacking one to fit bearings, just for the joy of having something that is properly engineered.

The dominant themes in the thread relate to using existing WiFi infrastructure in real world environments. I thought it would be obvious that I was critiquing this line of thinking. Obviously not.

This is just a dedicated RF emitter combined with a dedicated receiver. The fact that is it uses WiFi hardware is probably just because that's the cheapest and most available hardware for the researcher to work with. There is no indication in the article that the WiFi can actually be used for transmitting real data at the same time; that a non-dedicated WiFi source can be used; that it works when there are many people between transmitter and receiver.

Therefore the ideas that this might apply to real-world situations and use existing WiFi infrastructure, are a stretch given the information that's been shared.

It basically doesn't seem like a big deal to demonstrate what has been demonstrated.

You'd be surprised by how many amateur cyclists ride more than that each year.

You wouldn't.

As an 8k km/yr cyclist with a lot of cycling friends, I can tell you that 12.5k/yr is extremely high for an amateur. Sure, there are some, but a truly tiny proportion.

8k/year eats bikes, BTW. I used to wear out rims regularly before I switched to disks and chains/sprockets didn't even last a year (on a fixed gear bike).

The idea that you can apply lower-quality engineering practices in some systems is totally wrong, I think. Good engineering practices will help you retain good developers, will allow you to maintain a sustainable development pace and will prevent you annoying your users so much that they stop using your system. I can't imagine any commercial project where this doesn't matter.

Isn't this just another representation of the fallacy that it's possible to deliver faster by cutting quality? That's the kind of thing I expect to hear from ignorant stakeholders who know nothing about developing software, not on HN.

Our team has thorough, high quality, automated tests. In the past 5 years we have never released such a badly broken system that emergency remedial work was required. We still don't release on Fridays. It's just common sense, risk management and (most importantly) respect for the developers home and family time.

Merlin Bird ID 1 year ago

Fantastic app. My wife and I are gradually becoming able to recognise more and more birds by their call. This is great because the human ear is better than the app at rejecting environmental noise - so we can spot birds by their call even close to a noisy road when the app cannot.

The app, at least on my Pixel 6, struggles with very high frequency calls - e.g. long-tailed tits.

My best spot yet? A nightingale in Wimbledon.

The preliminary report seems to suggest that the yacht's construction was at fault.

I don't understand the following: "The study indicated that if the wind was blowing directly onto Bayesian’s beam and the yacht was in the ‘motoring’ condition, a gusting wind speed in excess of 63.4kts would likely result in the vessel capsizing"

...but it didn't capsize - it sank (due to water coming down the main stairs, reading between the lines of the report).

The angle of vanishing stability, in the configuration in which it sank, was estimated as 70 degrees - and the videos I saw seemed to show it blown further over than that.

Anyway, the report makes an interesting read (as do all the MAIB incident reports - they are addictive reading if you're interested in boats).

I built something like this. I am amused that mine too was built for my wife and also was one of the few techie things I've ever done that received unqualified spousal approval.

Mine shows weather and tide times at my wife's rowing club. It has the form-factor of a large fridge magnet. This led to the need to be battery powered and therefore very frugal with power - so a RPi wasn't feasible. It uses an ESP32. The data itself is collated by an AWS lambda.

The media coverage at the time (which I followed closely because I worked in this space) indicated that the UK was under a great deal of pressure from the US to ban Huawei. The US was allegedly concerned that the use of Huawei equipment would allow US/UK shared intelligence to be eavesdropped by the CCP. The US pressure was widely viewed in the UK as having an economic purpose disguised as security.

A quick search found: https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/short_news/uk-bann...

"...energy use per unit of GDP is the lowest in the G7"

The article characterises that fact as "energy starvation". Wouldn't "efficiency" be a better analysis? Low energy use per GDP or per capita is surely a thoroughly good thing.

If you want repairability then you can buy a Dualit. They are unreasonably expensive but very easy to fix. Mine is 25 years old. I replaced one of the elements a few years ago. It's held together with screws and bolts - totally user-repairable.

Fun project, nice write-up, but not solving a problem that needs to be solved.

My experience of apps built by "the business" is 13 years in UBS and Bank of America. "The business" cannot be trusted to understand regulatory and privacy concerns, they cannot test their apps, they do not concern themselves with vulnerabilites in their dependencies or the licence terms therof. For those reasons, and more, the ability for the business to deliver apps more cheaply than IT is illusory.

That doesn't stop a cyclical swing towards RAD/no-code/AI when people forget this and then a swing back when we remember.

A $1k Wheelchair 2 years ago

$1000 is not cheap for an off the shelf wheelchair such as hospitals make available for patients (in the UK, at least). That was my first thought on reading the article - "$1000 for a wheelchair, really?" - and a quick Google shows that you can buy what looks like reasonable quality wheelchairs for less than that. But the ones on the article are custom-made for each buyer, which is clearly a vastly more expensive option.

But, to the point, hospitals don't buy custom wheelchairs.

For anything more complex than an anonymous online flower shop, it is simpler to partition the whole thing off – for each customer/tenant.

Is this really a viable approach at the scale of B2B SaaS like Salesforce (or, contextually, Algolia)? They would end up with literally 10s of 1000s of DBs. That is surely cost-prohibitive.

Absolutely my experience too. Story points have been an effective tool for me with multiple teams in several different companies over the past two decades. They aren't, by themselves, the complete answer to any problem - they need to be applied within the context of a healthy team and engineering culture. And some senior management persistently misunderstand them and want to do insane things like compare velocities between teams. But they are a good and useful tool in the hands of a good team.

But mass transit carries more people per wheel, and the weight of the bus does not scale linearly with the carrying capacity, so it doesn't automatically follow that "individual transportation is actually better...". I doubt that 50 EVs carrying one person each generate less tyre wear than one bus carrying 50 people.