Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | deadfish's comments login

I learnt the word beeves while reading the Doctrine (the PHP ORM) codebase. I assume it was in case someone had an entity called beef... So the collection would be beeves :) I wonder if anyone ever used Doctrine and had an entity called beef.


The first contact from aliens will surely be them exploiting this with an XSS attack to set window.location to a Rick Roll video.


No need for hope. At this point surely it is a given?


The UK Labour Party have a long history of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. And Starmer, while a much better human being than any of the current Tory leadership, appears to be lacking in political instincts.



He has made some worrying decisions. Including much sitting on the fence on important issues, such as Brexit. I'm not wild about him getting in with a massive majority.


Disagree. My criticism of him - my ardour has cooled very much - is that he's as much of a political weasel as all the rest.

I think his calculus was bang-on to avoid taking a Brexit position. He probably captures the anti-Brexit vote by default, whereas Brexit support was strong in the labour heartlands (and he can not afford to antagonise that base - they flipped improbably blue just to support Brexit). By doing nothing, he's made Brexit an albatross that the tories must wear.

Everything I've seen from him suggests that he's a canny operator. He's been very anodyne in his economics, because the only thing he can achieve by setting out his stall is to alienate. The voters he's already got aren't going to vote harder.

His strategy is to be "not tory" and his tactics are to not prevent the tories from making blunder after blunder. I think this is absolutely the right strategy and tactics. By contrast, the Lib Dems have much more work to do.


Being evasive about your policies, because you don't want to alienate anyone, seems a dubious strategy, at best.


Ah! I now see why you think he is bad at politics. I'm sorry to shatter your illusions.

In a better system, it would be. But this is UK politics. If you don't win outright, you lose. Therefore, for most of us, we don't vote _for_ our preferred candidate, we vote _against_ our enemy. I haven't had the luxury of voting Lib Dem for years - I'd just be throwing my vote away.

Starmer only needs to present himself as the end of the tories. That's what the country wants more than anything else. They would vote for a sack of potatoes if it looked like the best chance of rooting out the tories.

No matter how credible, sane, fully costed or appealing his policy may be, the Mail and the Sun will use it to sow FUD, and his vote will decrease. Fuck, you think our electorate votes on policy? No, my friend. They vote based on emotive rhetoric.

If he remains anodyne, his enemies can only clutch mist. The plebs can project their desires onto him. He presents very little attack surface to the media.

Contrast with Corbyn. Out of context, when offered his manifesto policies, the plebs liked them far better than tory policy - yet he failed to win. Why? Because he was wide open to attack. The media painted him as a crank. They drowned him in FUD. Swing voters voted against him because they thought he'd crash the economy or disband the army or something. They didn't read his manifesto - they read Littlejohn lying about his manifesto. They read clickbait published by motivated liars in their Facebook feeds.

For clarity, Corbyn would have been a poor PM, but hopefully you now see that leadership quality is immaterial to the electoral process. If not, look outside.

No; Starmer must at all costs avoid throwing away his victory. He must stay mum except for occasionally - not too often - giving a little shove when the Tory self-destruction looks like slowing down. Keep the focus on them and win by default.


Voting for fringe parties has more effect than people give it credit for - they can and do put pressure on the main parties even when they dont get a lot of votes. With UKIP it changed the whole country (not for the better obviously, but they did).

That said, I'd make an exception for Lib Dems purely because the party is full of awful people with no real principles who have and would turn on a dime for political advantage. It has been a vote in the bin for 24 years.


I'll vote for the Lib Dems simply because that is the most likely way we can get proportional representation.


The Lib Dems had their chance though, in the 2010 coalition with the Tories. Lib Dems might indeed be the biggest party promoting proportional representation as a policy, but what is to say that they will be able to implement it even if they did form a government?


It turned out David Cameron was willing to give them PR without a referendum but they didn't ask for it. I doubt they will make that mistake again.


Pretty sure that is still not the meaning of refactoring. As I understand it refactoring should mean no changes to the external interface but changes to how it is implemented internally.


You could see it as the whole international flight system being refactored, consumers will still use planes like before


We can pontificate on how to define the scope of a system here. I will only state that, from the perspective of a consumer, you could consider this a Service on which the interface of find flight, book flight, etc. would appear to be the same while the connections internal to each of the above modules would have to account for the change.

Functionally, I suppose it's the equivalent of upgrading an ID field that was originally declared as an unsigned 32 bit integer to a wider 64 bit representation. We may not be changing anything fundametal in the functionality, but every boundary interface, protocol, and storage mechanism must now suffer through a potentially painful modification.


I believe it is because the will get delisted if they are not trading for 18 months and they have not been trading for 17 months at this point.


An electric heater runs current through a wire .. the waste product of doing so is heat. The more you 'waste' the more heat produced.

I guess the more efficient version of the same thing would be the move to using heat pumps.


Electric heaters are the classic exception in energy efficiency calculations. The heat produced is only wasted in that it will eventually dissipate. But heat is exactly what you wanted when you turned the heater on, and so heaters are often described as 100% efficient. I guess with heat pumps this logic makes less sense. It is more efficient to move heat around than to generate it.

Not quite sure how this relates to Proof of Work. People don't generally run mining rigs because they want to generate heat. The heat is almost always waste.

I've always wondered if the economics of using CPUs in heaters to do something useful and generate heat would ever work out.


If I were them I would be more concerned by Revolut, Monzo, Starling and Atom than Apple.


Looks like the cost of nuclear in Australia is not comparable.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/too-slow-too-expensive-why-nucle....


I don't think we can trust these numbers

https://www.engineersaustralia.org.au/sites/default/files/re...

"The spread of projected and reported capital costs is unsurprisingly broad. In Australia the most recent public assessment is provided by the GenCost2018 report by CSIRO and AEMO.10 It assumes the capital costs for SMR technology is $16,000/kW in 2020 (and experiences no major price decline over time). We note this number is more than double other cost estimates worldwide. We have sought additional clarification on the basis for this costing. Initial advice is that the number is based on a GHD estimate for AEMO of costs for a future Gen IV reactor to be constructed in 2035 and not for the type of reactor which would most likely be deployed in Australia."

Anyhow, that 16k estimate is for power, not for energy... It's unclear over which timespans comparisons are being made (since a lot of it depends for how long power plants will be kept operational... A huge cost is the initial investment).

I've seen energy estimates as low as 30$ per MWh, for Nuclear energy plants built with interest rates of 3%


I see a benchmark for the data size... But as other comments have suggested gzip should remove the majority of that difference.

I'd be more interested to know about serialisation and deserialisation time.


Not that I don't agree with a lot of what you are saying, but I think despite being digital crypto is a lot more like cash than card payments. But cash also has 'no rollback, no fraud detection or insurance'. At least you are don't have the risk of counterfeit notes.


Sure, and that's one of the reasons cash is going to disappear in the coming decades and yet another flaw in the design of bitcoin (which was modelled on physical currency or some sort of electronic gold just as that loses favour). It's not competing with cash, it's competing with free instant transfers between bank accounts and free payments (for the customer), which many people enjoy right now.

Physical currency was always an instrument of states, and now they have better ones, which retailers, consumers, and states prefer (digital currencies, not cryptocurrencies). In many countries cash usage is down to 20%, it's expensive to produce and manage and not required any more.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: