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There's a similar UK initiative which has spread to a number of other countries.

Nurdles are everywhere... https://www.nurdlehunt.org.uk/nurdle-finds.html


Oh thanks! I was looking for something similar when I posted.



[flagged]


I don’t know. It’s almost like people need to get paid for their work. The real question is why do you feel so entitled that you believe that you should get everything for free?


Here's the issue, if you wanted to read every interesting article posted to HN on a given week who would have to be subscribed to 15-20 different paid services... which I'm sure you'll agree is ridiculous.

Currently I subscribe to Disney+ and Amazon Prime only, because I was only using Netflix for maybe two hours per week and for me, that's not worth the price.

If I use the same logic for online magazines and newspapers, there is no online text content that I use for more than two hours per week and as such, the ridiculous subs prices make no sense to me. Also, it's highly likely I would end up subscribing to say NYT, and then that week all I really want to read is something on Forbes or Bloomberg and nothing on NYT, or a similar scenario. There is too much fragmentation and the value proposition just isn't there. It's like there were 15 different streaming services with content roughly divided between them.

Sure people need to make a living but the current model just doesn't work for me. Maybe if I was "rich" I would just pay for every text based publication out there, but I'm not, and paying for something I use so little makes no sense.


Can you please let me know where in the following error message I'm getting I can find the instructions to pay the WSJ?

> You have been blocked.

> Why? Something about the behaviour of the browser has caught our attention.

> There are various possible explanations for this:

> You are browsing and clicking at a speed much faster than expected of a human being.

> Something is preventing JavaScript from working on your computer.

> There is a robot on the same network IP as you.


You know what the error message means, you've decided to use a non-fully-featured browser to visit their webpage. It's like taking the wheels off of your car and then complaining that your immobile vehicle isn't eligble for the drive-thru lane at a restaurant.

They have a print edition that you're welcome to buy from any local store that sells newspapers.


I'm sorry, I'll tell Mozilla that Firefox is non-fully-featured right away.

HN doesn't seem to mind it, I don't see why showing me a bunch of text is such an insurmountable technical challenge for a website.

Also, to continue the car analogy, it's more like turning your headlights off and the drive-through complains that your car is nonstandard and won't let you order.


Why would you tell Mozilla that? Their firefox browser works just fine with WSJ, both to display articles and to subscribe to their digital offerings.

As is nearly always the case: the user is at fault.

To fix the car analogy that you maliciously broke, it's like a car that you took the engine out of, and then complain that it doesn't drive. But if anyone asks why your car is broken, you weirdly pretend that you didn't take the engine out of it, and make asinine statements about how "it has wheels, why doesn't it roll" knowing full well why it doesn't.


You don't even know anything about my browser, yet you insist that it's somehow broken for accessing websites. Whatever.


That's false. I know several things about your browser based on what you've said:

- You get errors saying that your browser doesn't support javascript.

- You're using Mozilla Firefox, which fully supports javascript

- The WSJ website works with up-to-date Mozilla Firefox out of the box

This means you've broken or tampered with Firefox using an extension or setting, or perhaps have some other strategy to disable javascript.

So what's happening here? It's either:

1. You know exactly what is happening: you disabled javascript and you're wasting everyone's time with a weird game where you pretend to be stupid

2. You are very low-skill in this area and have no idea what you've done or why

I assumed "1" because "2" is pretty unlikely for a user on this forum and quite mean to assume.


I paid for that, I buy stuff all the time and companies are taking some of that money for their ad budgets and send it to websites so that they can use it to finance their content. It is nice of them that they are not only using my money to finance content I want to see but as an added bonus also want to make me happy with flashy ads, but I do not want to see those, so I block them.


I have subscribed to Japantimes, only to find out it uses a 3rd party integration - piano.io, I can’t access the content I’ve paid for without enabling 3rd party tracking. Worse the JWT token has my name and email address in it (base64).

Then realized that paying makes me more targeted. I can just buy a newspaper at any kiosk without a subscription and it doesn’t have cookies in it.


Is it ok if he/she says its for ML training? :-)


Because, frankly, most of this content is very cheap. As in the value of these 'news' is zero and often negative.

These are not starving journalists trying to reveal the 'truth'. These are big corporate entities peddling a lot of fast food content and the agenda of their shareholders/sponsors. The 'real' journalists (if such a thing still exists) who work there get paid peanuts compared to how much they squeeze from the millions of readers through these anti patterns.

Now that they built this huge ship, they have to keep producing content just to keep it afloat, regardless of whether there's any value in it for the readers. Most of the time there is none. Important news will reach you without any paywalls.

I don't feel entitled, in fact I don't really care about TFA. The link was posted to HN and then immediately someone commented with a archive link, because the original link is not working for most of the people here who never pay for news, because they know better.

But the WWW is now broken for everyone because of this.


If you have a better solution to the problem of making journalism financially viable I'm sure a lot of people would be very interested to hear it.


Micro payments, I might want to pay some small amount for this one article but not subscribe to the whole publication.


This has been tried many times and nobody has been able to make it work. What would you do differently?


if that were an economical model for the Wall Street Journal, they would do it.

the truth is that microtransactions would cannabilize their existing subscriber base more than raise revenue.


Yup. I'd pay 10-20 cents. And if i could pay $1-$2.00 for a good article to let the next 5-10 ppl read it on me i'd do that too.


Journalists need to eat and advertising-funded websites rely on people clicking on the adverts and spending money.

People are strangely reluctant to do this.

As we all know, the true reason people don't buy stuff from online adverts is that the adverts just aren't loud, visible and obnoxious enough.

If we make it literally physically impossible to look at anything else or navigate away, people will buy some of what we're peddling.


Journalists don't need to eat though. They can be replaced by fully automated open source and free AI news agent self loops run by volunteer computation resources.

If they're going to exploit our attention and refused implement free and open source newsagents on their own, but instead extort us for subscriptions and steal our attention with unwanted ads, then we have no choice but to displace them with our own free and liberated solutions to the news problem.

Their time is marked.


Yeah, it would be great if this was integrated in browsers :)

PS: I'm ok with paying for news, but not like this.


I'm not okay with paying with news. If I have to pay with news by losing attention, it is far better to simply have no news.

Who the heck cares what Boeing did this or that if it requires guzzling a hot steamy load of ads or purchasing a subscription. I definitely don't want that.

This is part of why user operated independent and free and open source AI news agents are going to make things a lot better.


> A number of New Zealand petrol pumps stopped working on Thursday due to a "leap year glitch" in payment software, fuel stations and the payment service provider said.

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/leap-year-glitch-...


Related ongoing thread:

Self-pay gas station pumps break across NZ as software can't handle Leap Day - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39553755 - Feb 2024 (31 comments)


I'm sure it's more complicated than "we didn't think about leap years", but it certainly sounds pretty amateurish.

Old programmer rant: In my day, we fixed the Y2K bug - we went to the future and back several times a day!


In your day people weren't doing everything with string ops in JavaScript.


Oh, the progress we've made!


It does sound amateurish eh? I do most of my business logic inside Microsoft SQL Server Stored Procedure, and MS SQL just takes care of date pretty well.

But then, come to think of it, you don't need to use SQL to have good date logic. C# and Java both have excellent date handing libraries. I don't know about C++, but I'd be surprised if there was not a modern date library for C++, so I am of the opinion there should be no excuses for software not to work on the 29th of Feb.


> but I'd be surprised if there was not a modern date library for C++

The standard library now includes <chrono>. AFAIK: It was mostly written by Howard Hinnant. He now has more date/time libs that expand upon <chrono>: https://github.com/HowardHinnant/date


Yes if you're writing your own date/time routines, dealing with dates as seconds since epoch, or anything like that you're going to get burned.

Use date handling functions and libraries that have been developed by people who know how to do it and have been battle tested.


Even today the LEGO-compatible knock-offs are complete junk, my kids occasionally end up picking up a loose bag for £1 from the local charity shop. Pieces don't stick together properly (with each other, let alone LEGO pieces); legs, arms, and hands come off the minifigs; etc. You can instantly tell — even ignoring the assault rifles that would never make it in a LEGO box.


Nowadays there are several "knock-offs" on the market with higher quality and at a cheaper price.


I'm often stumped by the high level engineering that went into these "toys".


> Spotify reported that it had 9,400 employees at the end of the third quarter of 2023. It had already cut back employee numbers by 6% in January and by a further 2% in June.


I'm also curious what they need 10k people for. What of the business is so labor-intensive?


Every Spotify wrapped is put together by hand


I had a good chuckle at this


I'd guess managing labels, podcasters, marketing & ads + moderation takes a huge chunk there.


I would like to say "curating the library" but it's probably license paperwork and negotiations with the rightsholders.


Probably those require a lot of local branch offices for legal reasons, so that's a lot of HR/admin overhead.


the constant interface overhauls they do, probably


I wonder what they were all doing. Their special apps, like the iWatch, are below par and they are pretty much the last service that doesn't offer HQ audio. AI does most of the editorial playlist generation. What are nearly 10K people doing?


Probably just a fraction of employees are doing software, the bulk of the work is managing contracts, labels, legal compliance in 250 countries, marketing, administration, etc.


Product sprints aren't going to run themselves


Reminds of the quote attributed to Naval Ravikant (paraphrased):

You have one person running the website. They leave and, of course, you need two people to replace that one person. Then, eventually, one of them leaves, you need two people to replace them etc. This brings you to a scenario where you have 5,000 people maintaining the website and changes take years.


yea seriosuly.. they're desktop app is electron. its not like their individual apps are getting special attention.

imho, I'd pay extra for a good NATIVE spotify client for the mac


> they're desktop app is electron

AFAIK, it's not actually Electron, but their own tooling using Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). Also AFAIK, they came up with their solution for this before Electron was even a thing (so before Atom the code editor, which Electron came from).


No you wouldn't


There's a company working to build a 3600km long cable between solar + wind farms in Morocco, and the UK. 3.6GW cable, 10GW of generation, 20GW of battery storage, and the cable should run at full load for 20h a day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco%E2%80%93UK_Powe...


Good questions

> Are the raw files in the working repository GeoPackages?

The working copy for a vector/table dataset can be in a GeoPackage or a SQL database like PostGIS. For rasters/point-clouds they're flat files.

> How is it tracking the changes made inside the geopackages?

In general, triggers which store RowIDs/PKs of inserts/updates/deletes. Then when you ask for a diff or make a commit Kart figures out any actual row-level (or schema) differences.

> What happens if it's replaced with an updated copy of the geopackage the was edited via some other application?

If it's edited by something else (QGIS, ArcGIS, python/go/whatever application, SQL CLI, whatever) it'll work: you do edits where you want to. If it's replaced by something else, it won't work.

> How does it diff the changes?

Comparing the features/rows in the repository (and their schemas) against the rows in the working copy database. It uses the stored list of modified rowids to make this fast.



yeah that looks to be it


The BluMartin FreshAir 100 and the Fresh-R series are both MVHR units that fit into existing walls: there’s a Fresh-R model that goes into a window frame too.


Different brands vary, but IME this is only correct for a few weeks at best. Otherwise you'll get a lot of residue, and if it's been outside exposed to UV you'll get even more. And duck tape is worse.


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