Hacker News: Symbiote

New comment by Symbiote in "A new Postcrossing stamp from the USA"

Symbiote — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 20:56:12 +0000

In Denmark, 46DKK ~= $7.15.

New comment by Symbiote in "Slovenia becomes first EU country to introduce fuel rationing"

Symbiote — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 23:32:40 +0000

It would probably be illegal under EU law to discriminate between residents and non residents of Slovenia

New comment by Symbiote in "Is it a pint?"

Symbiote — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 16:37:31 +0000

At least in the UK it's a legal requirement to use marked glassware when serving beer, cider and wine. (Or to use a marked measuring cylinder and pour that into the drinkware, which is sometimes done for wine.)

It's also the law in at least some EU countries, although I haven't checked beyond Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fill_line

New comment by Symbiote in "Two pilots dead after plane and ground vehicle collide at LaGuardia"

Symbiote — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 09:23:39 +0000

> And so much of the legacy media info is wrong. It’s strange because a lot of the primary sources are public.

You should provide sources for a claim like that. For example, what in the BBC article is wrong?

New comment by Symbiote in "GrapheneOS refuses to comply with new age verification laws for operating system"

Symbiote — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 07:17:10 +0000

And HN would complain even more about the loss of privacy.

New comment by Symbiote in "HP trialed mandatory 15-minute support call wait times (2025)"

Symbiote — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 14:29:14 +0000

It can't be that complicated.

My doctor's office phone manages "You are number two in the queue". Somewhere, maybe it was a previous doctor, added "and should expect to wait about 5 minutes".

New comment by Symbiote in "Honda is killing its EVs"

Symbiote — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 09:08:31 +0000

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/1998/70/oj/eng

This EU directive banned the sale of leaded petrol in the UK on 1 January 2000.

New comment by Symbiote in "Show HN: I built a tool that watches webpages and exposes changes as RSS"

Symbiote — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 23:36:22 +0000

I added my employer's website RSS feed to the all-staff Slack channel. I find it useful, I don't know about others but no one has grumbled.

https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/218688467-Add-RSS...

New comment by Symbiote in "Cloudflare crawl endpoint"

Symbiote — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 10:36:11 +0000

I think Common Crawl already offers this, although it's free: https://commoncrawl.org/

New comment by Symbiote in "Florida judge rules red light camera tickets are unconstitutional"

Symbiote — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 20:10:38 +0000

You named the two European countries higher than the USA, and ignored the 12 that are lower.

New comment by Symbiote in "Florida judge rules red light camera tickets are unconstitutional"

Symbiote — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 20:03:50 +0000

Because they bought the most dangerous tool we have in common use, and society decided to make the law.

The owner isn't responsible for the drivers actions, but they are required to name the driver. (Or declare the car stolen etc.)

(At least in much of Europe.)

New comment by Symbiote in "Swiss vote places right to use cash in country's constitution"

Symbiote — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 12:13:47 +0000

Denmark advised citizens to have some emergency cash, but then also advised people to use it sometimes — explaining that otherwise, the systems that deal with cash won't necessarily function properly in a crisis.

New comment by Symbiote in "Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma"

Symbiote — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 09:38:02 +0000

My guess is many KDE users have one or two adjustments they make, but we're all different.

I add a "keep window above others" button to the window title bar and set the "menu" key on my keyboard to be Compose.

New comment by Symbiote in "Does that use a lot of energy?"

Symbiote — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 08:56:59 +0000

I often do my laundry at night, what's the problem? I set it to finish roughly when I intend to get up.

Turning the lights off made a lot of sense in the 1990s and earlier, when each bulb was 60W.

New comment by Symbiote in "Does that use a lot of energy?"

Symbiote — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 08:50:43 +0000

The EU Energy label on the first (more expensive) washing machine I looked at said 440Wh for a cycle, so 800Wh for an average one isn't unreasonable.

New comment by Symbiote in "Ubuntu is planning to comply with Age Verification law"

Symbiote — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 21:09:03 +0000

This is a Reddit discussion about a mailing list discussion.

Canonical's actual announcement (saying they don't yet have an announcement) is here: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntus-response-to-californi...

New comment by Symbiote in "AWS outage due to drone attacks in UAE"

Symbiote — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 20:39:18 +0000

It's not quite as clear-cut as it might first seem.

The school was either within or bordering a military barracks, depending which way you wish to spin it.

Al-Jazeera's article has obvious bias, but plenty of pictures and diagrams:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/3/questions-over-minab...

New comment by Symbiote in "Museum of Plugs and Sockets"

Symbiote — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 15:24:42 +0000

The UK plug is probably not as tightly secured, but the pins are rectangular and almost twice the width of the round CEE pins. I think the result is it's pretty much equivalent.

Unearthed UK plugs simply don't exist.

New comment by Symbiote in "Museum of Plugs and Sockets"

Symbiote — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 22:11:09 +0000

I'm only a tourist when I visit places with NEMA sockets, so I'm sure I see much more worn sockets than a resident of America.

But I often find sockets that have a loose grip on heavier plugs, like a phone charger, or a NEMA-CEE adaptor.

(Half my experience is in Central and South America, where maintenance is probably worse — though in Africa old CEE or UK sockets are usually OK.)

New comment by Symbiote in "Museum of Plugs and Sockets"

Symbiote — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 21:53:35 +0000

I agree (Except British plugs which are also fine if made properly¹).

Denmark made installing CEE (the French version) sockets legal in 2011, but the only place I've seen one is a friend's house — he's German and swapped the sockets when he bought it.

¹ Hong Kong also uses British plugs, and this seems to have led some Chinese manufacturers to make non-compliant, unsafe plugs which fit — and nowadays with Amazon, AliExpress etc selling any old rubbish they are sometimes seen in Britain.