Hacker News: atvcatole

New comment by atvcatole in "The metre originated in the French Revolution"

atvcatole — Sun, 25 May 2025 16:58:39 +0000

I believe they used Parisian variants of the french units.

They measured the distance between the Mediterranean Sea and the North Sea through Paris with platinum rulers measuring 2 Toise de Paris.

The toise was different in different parts of France, so it was specifically the Paris one they used, and the goal was to get rid of local variants of the same units with vague definitions like toise, point, line, inch, feet, mil(e) etc.

Once they had the distance in Toise de Paris and did some math they could define the circumference of the earth and define the meter at 1/40 000 000 of that.

That length was 443.44 Lignes de Paris where a ligne is 1/864 toise.

New comment by atvcatole in "Mozilla flamed by Firefox fans after reneging on promises to not sell their data"

atvcatole — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 21:51:56 +0000

Donations don't go to Firefox. As the comment you replied to indicated, they've set up their organization in a way so that users can't pay/donate to Firefox.

New comment by atvcatole in "Couriers mystified by the algorithms that control their jobs"

atvcatole — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 09:37:45 +0000

With a business account it's even better. Where I work we get one electronic invoice at the end of the month that is automatically paid and entered into the accounting system with the correct VAT code for all purchases and deliveries that month. The savings compared to processing 20/40x traditional charges is way more than what they charge.

New comment by atvcatole in "Ubuntu Desktop 24.04 LTS: Noble Numbat"

atvcatole — Sat, 27 Apr 2024 20:48:05 +0000

Wow! Ubuntu netinstall is ~80MB...

New comment by atvcatole in "Ubuntu Desktop 24.04 LTS: Noble Numbat"

atvcatole — Sat, 27 Apr 2024 20:47:01 +0000

> I really wish net installers were still popular.

Ubuntu still has netinstall available as an option, it's ~80MB.

New comment by atvcatole in "The failure of self-checkout technology"

atvcatole — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 14:56:48 +0000

> why don't they add a camera that can guess what is your fruit/veg, or at least suggest 2-3 items that look close?

They had one of those in a larger supermarket I visited last summer. (EDIT: In Norway) They also had those mobile bar code scanners you bring with you and dock in your trolley, and app payment (including receipt storage), so the entire process was pretty smooth.

I live in a city so I don't use those large supermarkets, so I don't know if this is something new or not.

New comment by atvcatole in "The failure of self-checkout technology"

atvcatole — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 14:48:07 +0000

Some stores here in Norway uses computer vision to identify the produce, I tried it out last summer and it successfully identified ~9/10 with the rutabaga being the one it didn't manage, but the touch keyboard was responsive and easy to use for that one.

For things with more than one option (e.g. organic/non-organic lemons) it would show the 1-4 products it though was relevant and I just had to click the touch monitor on the correct one.

New comment by atvcatole in "Who wants to be tracked?"

atvcatole — Thu, 18 May 2023 21:12:35 +0000

How would that change anything?

DNT = no consent, no DNT = no consent

New comment by atvcatole in "Facebook LLAMA is being openly distributed via torrents"

atvcatole — Sat, 04 Mar 2023 07:20:42 +0000

The 2017 movie Marjorie Prime with Jon Hamm is about this topic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7PtcOLJDco

New comment by atvcatole in "IMDB deleted all negative user reviews for The Rings of Power"

atvcatole — Sat, 03 Sep 2022 19:12:13 +0000

I think it's more common when books are adapted to TV/movies, so it's not as obvious as when they change historical characters or characters from other or older visual media. Often they change the location to North America/Europe and change the characters "organically" as well.

Anyway, here's the ones I can think of right away:

Ancient One in the Marvel movies to Tilda Swinton, although the comic character is kind of a racist stereotype, and would have issues in China, so they had good arguments for doing that change.

Staying in the comic universe, Bane and Ra's al Ghul in Batman movies.

Related to the first one; Benedict Cumberbatch plays Khan in the new Star Trek.