Hacker News: arethuza

New comment by arethuza in "England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C"

arethuza — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 07:05:45 +0000

Well, I'm an independence supporting Scot and I don't have any concerns about the actual running of the referendum - I do agree that the BBC coverage was biased but I think that is largely because they are "conservative" (note the small C) in the sense of having a bias towards preserving the status-quo. This was pretty clear from the Brexit referendum where I thought they favoured the status-quo there and, as a Remainer, I guess I was pretty happy with that!

New comment by arethuza in "England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C"

arethuza — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:38:30 +0000

I must admit I've never heard NI being called a country... wouldn't be the UK if there wasn't some horrible complication involved.

New comment by arethuza in "England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C"

arethuza — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:34:47 +0000

The UK seems fairly relaxed about constituent parts leaving (Scotland was given a referendum, NI has option to leave if they want) - which I don't believe applies to US states?

New comment by arethuza in "50k Boat Names"

arethuza — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:46:00 +0000

Indeed they did - all the way back to 1672:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_ship_Entreprenant

New comment by arethuza in "Over 181,000 AI meeting recordings left wide open in note taking app"

arethuza — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:40:10 +0000

All depends which god we are disproving the existence of?

New comment by arethuza in "50k Boat Names"

arethuza — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:09:50 +0000

If I buy a yacht I'd name it "The Ends of Invention" - have been keeping that name handy for almost 40 years since I read CP in a oner in May 1988.

New comment by arethuza in "50k Boat Names"

arethuza — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:34:30 +0000

Amusing that the page for ships called HMS Enterprise linked to from the USS Enterprise page points out that the name came originally from the French!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Enterprise

New comment by arethuza in "Tail-Call Interpreters in Rust – Jimmy Ostler"

arethuza — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:11:08 +0000

I wasn't saying that I thought it should be adopted as a standard for others to follow - just that (somewhat weirdly) I personally find the code segments on that page quite easy to read.

New comment by arethuza in "Tail-Call Interpreters in Rust – Jimmy Ostler"

arethuza — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 10:46:30 +0000

I actually find it quite readable - YMMV.

New comment by arethuza in "US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects"

arethuza — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:41:15 +0000

Didn't the Roman Empire last nearly 1,500 years in one form or another?

New comment by arethuza in "More German than many Germans"

arethuza — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 14:20:54 +0000

"Berlin is the _least_ German Germany city, by far."

Isn't that a common complaint in the lot of countries - people complain about London in the UK in a very similar fashion?

New comment by arethuza in "Decades-old fish sauce at abandoned factory in Canada finally being removed"

arethuza — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 13:24:50 +0000

"just need to spread it out sufficiently"

Use a crop duster type aircraft - what could go wrong?

Edit: Growing up in a fishing village I'm fully aware of the potential for WMD level stench that the fishing industry is capable of generating.

New comment by arethuza in "Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code"

arethuza — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 13:08:01 +0000

When I did a CS degree in the 1980s we had one lecturer who handed out copies of hand-written notes but then would talk about stuff that wasn't really in the notes - sort of verbal annotations.

Guess what he would ask about in the exams?

New comment by arethuza in "The Strongest El Niño Ever"

arethuza — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 11:48:16 +0000

Scotland here - have heard people from London talking about moving here for the weather.. which isn't something I ever expected to hear!

Was 10C this morning when I went out to walk my dog, in a t-shirt and shorts!

New comment by arethuza in "The World's 2,400 Castles"

arethuza — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 16:50:57 +0000

Same for Scotland - there are 3 castles within 2 km of where I live, not including a couple of really old ruined hill-forts... which I don't think is an unusual density of these things for this part of the world.

Edit: And of course there is also the huge castle 13km away across the sea sitting on its volcanic plug and very visible from here.

New comment by arethuza in "New era for Gibraltar with removal of border controls with Spain"

arethuza — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 10:41:40 +0000

I'm pretty sure that if the Argentinians hasn't invaded they would probably have the Falklands by now. As it is it I would think that it would be political suicide for any UK government to even contemplate any kind of deal.

New comment by arethuza in "Wikipedia escapes Category 1 designation under the UK Online Safety Act for now"

arethuza — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 08:21:41 +0000

The Forth Road Bridge stopped having tolls in 2008 and was effectively replaced more recently by a new bridge, the Queensferry Crossing, that has never had tolls.

New comment by arethuza in "Farage left fighting a trash can as the UK populist's election gamble backfires"

arethuza — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 18:32:41 +0000

"Cometh the hour, cometh the bin".

New comment by arethuza in "AI 2040: Plan A"

arethuza — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 18:24:59 +0000

The decision to not go with the development of extremely large thermonuclear weapons might count - the US Sundial Project was supposed to be about 10 gigatons of TNT. Not the most practical weapons but once you get to a certain size delivery arguably stops being a problem - its going to kill everyone anyway so doesn't matter where you let it off!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundial_(weapon)

Edit: Mind you, I wonder if the design for Sundial is stored somewhere...

New comment by arethuza in "CarPlay Is Additive"

arethuza — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 12:59:27 +0000

The steering wheel on my Scala has 8 buttons, two knobs (which can be clicked), 2 flappy paddles and 3 stalks...