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BayesianDice | 1 year ago | on: Ask HN: Dot EU domain instead of dot com?

I (in the UK) used to have a small local restaurant which had a .eu domain. When Brexit was happening, I mentioned this issue to them, and they explained the relevant individual was an EU citizen so they were OK in the short term but they were migrating anyway. (And I see they are now on a .co.uk domain.)

BayesianDice | 1 year ago | on: The IMEI Code: Your phone’s other number

BT in the UK has 17070 which tells you the number and lets you do tests like the "quiet line test". Handy when working out what was going on when I moved into a property with no live phone service (so no normal outgoing calls), lots of phone extension sockets, and (I discovered) two landlines coming in...

BayesianDice | 2 years ago | on: Ask HN: What you paying for .com renewal and with whom

There is another perspective to be aware of on this... I have been caught out by a service provider when it became clear the service I was using wasn't their main business - and their interest in properly maintaining and operating that service dropped - profoundly.

BayesianDice | 2 years ago | on: How to Not Get Screwed over as a Software Engineer [video]

I believe that is (or at least was) true at Google - although from what I knew of the role, it sounded like it also covered what I would consider project management. (I think I would often consider program mangement to be coordinating/managing across multiple projects as part of a broader program of work, but I don't think that was what Google meant by that title.)

BayesianDice | 2 years ago | on: Code Golfing in Commodore BASIC

I think I read about a tool for the Acorn BBC micros which you could apply to your program to remove unnecessary spaces etc. in the tokenised form and shave off a few bytes.

This had the side-effect that you could still display and (presumably with a bit more mental effort, read) the program listing fine, but re-entering a line as shown in that listing would fail because the computer depended on the spaces to do the parsing, even if they were redundant after the tokenisation happened.

BayesianDice | 2 years ago | on: Creator of Catan, Klaus Teuber, has died

I used to play a lot of Catan and loved the game but then stopped for a few years over COVID (while I played other games online). When I tried it again, that's when I noticed this "drought" problem more obviously. (But that's just a niggle in an otherwise great game!)

BayesianDice | 3 years ago | on: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server

I use Amazon SES to send system-generated messages from a couple of tiny websites I ran on EC2. When applying I needed to specify the volume, and put in a generous number in case the sites got a busy day - maybe 100-200/day (when realistic traffic probably averages single digits/day).

I promptly got approval for 50,000 mails/day!

BayesianDice | 3 years ago | on: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

The amended regulations (https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2022/984/schedule/made) refer to a requirement for connection to a "gigabit-capable public electronic communications network". And a "public electronic communications network" is defined in the Communications Act 2003 as "an electronic communications network provided wholly or mainly for the purpose of making electronic communications services available to members of the public".

So I expect that either type of service meeting the requirement on speed would be acceptable.

BayesianDice | 3 years ago | on: More U.S. companies charging employees for job training if they quit

Interesting to learn of the US rule. In the UK, up to £8000 of relocation expenses can be provided tax-free, for "qualifying expenses" (mainly costs of buying/selling home and moving -https://www.gov.uk/expenses-and-benefits-relocation/whats-ex...) although there is some allowance for a flat-rate payment if it is reasonable (https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/employment-income-m...). I'm reasonably confident any payment would be tax-deductible for the employer, it's just a question of how much is taxable as income in the hands of the employee.

BayesianDice | 3 years ago | on: Robert's Rules of Order (1876)

An alternative approach which I was taught at an enrichment course at school but which became more relevant as life and career progressed - be the minute-taker.

A lesson also learnable from top civil servant (good grief, I sound like a headline writer) Sir Humphrey in "Yes, Prime Minister" (episode "Man Overboard"): "Ah, Prime Minister... It is characteristic of all committee discussions and decisions that every member has a vivid recollection of them and that every member's recollection of them differs violently from every other member's recollection. Consequently we accept the convention that the official decisions are those and only those which have officially recorded in the minutes by the officials, from which it emerges with an elegant inevitability that any decision which has been officially reached will have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials and any decision which is not recorded in the minutes has not been officially reached even if one or more members believe they can recollect it, so in this particular case if the decision had been officially reached it would have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials. And it isn't so it wasn't."

BayesianDice | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: Why not have reverse life insurance that rewards longevity?

In the UK at least it looks like you can still get inflation index-linked annuities - for example, there are entries in the Hargreaves Lansdown "best buy" tables for for RPI-linked annuities: https://www.hl.co.uk/retirement/annuities/best-buy-rates

But their starting income is less than half the income from the non-increasing annuity, presumably because of difficulty/expense in hedging inflation risk.

BayesianDice | 4 years ago | on: Security Engineering Course

Thanks, I'd found the first edition a really good book when I was early in my security career many years ago, I shall have to check the 2020 edition!
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