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tenant's comments

tenant | 5 years ago | on: Our Chrome Extension Is Safe

Amazon actually takes your money and also has competitors (high street etc). I think that partly explains some of the differences in their approach to your point (c). I think that Amazon also delegates a lot of the pain you're talking about onto their employees rather than their bottom line. BTW I speak as a complete hypocrite who is a happy Amazon customer.

tenant | 6 years ago | on: Things I wished more developers knew about databases

An odd thing that happened to me yesterday with the PostgreSQL ODBC driver (psqlODBC) v9.3.400. It wouldn't let me insert a string longer than 255 characters long into a character varying field into a local v9.4 database on windows using a recordset update. I didn't have a problem pasting it in via pgadmin. Altered the field to text and the problem went away. I've a suspicion that there is a limit on text in the tens of thousands of characters length too though despite both those fields being essentially the same thing and limitless.

tenant | 6 years ago | on: Apollo 13 enhanced images reveal life on stricken spacecraft

Smallpox may have gone but I'm fairly sure that there was a vaccine for that a very long time ago. As regards extreme poverty, I don't know that the situation in sub-Saharan Africa has improved, it may even have become worse. But I'm not doubting that there have been massive improvements in a qualitative sense to such an extent that in some ways they are revolutionary.

The 50 or so years from about 1895 gave us powered flight, radio and television, the first antibiotics, nuclear energy, rockets capable of escaping earth orbit, the big bang understanding of the origins of the universe, motor cars and even car phones. They also gave us two world wars which may be significant. By comparison the last 50 years appears rather dull, from this layman's perspective.

tenant | 6 years ago | on: Apollo 13 enhanced images reveal life on stricken spacecraft

I remember watching the Apollo 13 movie for the first time in 1995 and thinking at the time how modern they were in those far off days of 1970. Now the same length of time has passed since 1995 (in the blink of an eye) and it still hasn't dated. The internet is huge but it feels like the only thing we've done since 1970.

tenant | 6 years ago | on: Two Chainsaw Secrets – Turning a Tree into Perfect Boards (2019) [video]

I believe that it's the impact of Covid 19 that has propelled this video onto the front page of Hacker News. Tons of people are doing DIY, gardening etc because of it and learning those skills on youtube. There is one channel I've discovered and though its creator is ostensibly just a carpenter he's also a historian, philosopher , a jack of all building trades and a wonderful communicator. I give you the Essential Craftsman https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzr30osBdTmuFUS8IfXtXmg

tenant | 6 years ago | on: Providence Lost: The Rise and Fall of Cromwell’s Protectorate

The article,though not the book, is by Simon Heffer who's always a bit controversial on matters Irish. In my view he'd be one of those British who still feel that, on maps the British Isles should in their entirety be coloured pink just as many Irish feel that the whole island of Ireland should be coloured green.

tenant | 6 years ago | on: Lyme disease bacteria eradicated by new drug in early tests

Coming from a farming background I spent a lot of time in close contact with grass etc. No one I know of ever came down with something like this but now it's becoming increasingly common though not among farmers. I have a suspicion that a lot of the people who would have formerly complained of Fibromyalgia, or mercury allergy, or ME are now getting this.

tenant | 6 years ago | on: What's the smallest country that can fit everyone standing six feet apart?

So, my country which feels big to me couldn't do it. This reinforces my belief that there are way too many of our species on this planet. Given that 2.1 or so is the replacement rate, a "hard" limit of two child per woman would be decent compromise as this would equate to somewhere around 1.7 taking into account women who don't want to /can't have children. In one generation, if there were no unintended consequences this would drop the population by 15%.

Sometime in the 2100s it would be half what it is today and my country could easily fit everyone!

tenant | 6 years ago | on: Gambas: Visual Basic on Linux

The phenomenal quantity of bugs and inconsistencies that makes Visual Basic so delightful persuaded me to start this project

It seems that Microsoft was aware of the poor quality of its language, as VB .Net is not backward compatible with older versions of Visual Basic.

I dislike the bad level of common Visual Basic programmers, often due to bad pratices imposed by the bugs and strangeness of this language.

Pity he couldn't resist taknng a swipe at vb and vb programmers in his introduction. Also he's inaccurate wrt to his comments about why Microsoft didn't make a vb7.

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