Hacker News: darreninthenet

New comment by darreninthenet in "Apple Music 404 Not Found"

darreninthenet — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 20:11:30 +0000

I've had my Apple watch for a very long and TIL you can turn the crown to scroll

New comment by darreninthenet in "Investor-owned utilities charge 23% more for electricity than public providers"

darreninthenet — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 13:55:30 +0000

Or "investor owned utilities pay out c-level bonuses and dividends equal to 23% of actual costs"

New comment by darreninthenet in "Woman faces six years in prison over Cash App account she never opened"

darreninthenet — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 22:08:35 +0000

They used to have this in Scorland - Guilty, Not Guilty and Not Proven, with the last two legally having the same affect (ie being aquitted) but I believe Not Proven was abolished at the start of this year.

New comment by darreninthenet in "The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable"

darreninthenet — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:12:14 +0000

I'm not sure your age cut off is quite right, I'm 50 in a few months and my wife and our friends are all quite "pro climate" (just to easily sum it up), most people I know from the younger end of GenX are... the problem lies just a few years beyond that with the older GenX and up into the Boomers, which is where all the money is.

New comment by darreninthenet in "How I changed teaching after AI managed to do all my homework assignments"

darreninthenet — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 15:11:02 +0000

And the students will think "damn that's the AI resistant question", or those that actually understand it will answer why with their working

New comment by darreninthenet in "How I changed teaching after AI managed to do all my homework assignments"

darreninthenet — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 08:55:55 +0000

Put a mixture of questions in that are impossible to answer but don't tell them, and as usual give them marks for explaining their working. Tell them you've devised the questions so some are "AI resistant" but don't tell them how. They'll never know if the AI has tripped up and hallucinated or given them the right answer. Only those that really understand what's going on will set out some working that shows they were on the right route and then got stuck where they were supposed to.

New comment by darreninthenet in "Nike exits the S&P 100 after 18 years and a $200B market-cap wipeout"

darreninthenet — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 09:38:14 +0000

It's interesting, I wear Sketchers for exactly the reason that they are the most comfortable shoe for being on my feet and standing/walking around all day... indeed when I was looking for such a shoe it was a friend of my wife's who is a nurse at our local hospitals A&E department who recommended them as practically what all the nurses (at least here in the uk) wear, according to her anyway.

New comment by darreninthenet in "No Man's Sky Cosmos"

darreninthenet — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 16:14:20 +0000

The X games?

New comment by darreninthenet in "Tiny $70 Xteink X3 e-reader"

darreninthenet — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 15:23:12 +0000

None, I use a Kobo for ebooks and mostly buy "real" paper books. But I was thinking this sounded like a great (and cheap) use case but then I thought why not just use my phone...

I don't have any social media apps on my phone anymore except "Hack" for HN... as you imply, too much temptation to distraction. I haven't missed them at all.

New comment by darreninthenet in "Tiny $70 Xteink X3 e-reader"

darreninthenet — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 13:16:33 +0000

I was thinking of getting one for exactly the use case you've described here but then I thought, "why don't I just get my phone out and read the ebooks directly on that?"

Can you explain to me why one of these is better for this please?

New comment by darreninthenet in "Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra"

darreninthenet — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 05:25:59 +0000

Funnily enough I do the same with my Intel iMac... I have a 2TB Thunderbolt 3 Glyph drive as my primary and boot drive and it works a dream... if I got one of these new Mac minis without upgrading the drive, presumably I could just plug this straight into it and apple will do its magical migration thing?

New comment by darreninthenet in "Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra"

darreninthenet — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 14:01:07 +0000

An additional £1,000 for a 2TB drive is crazy though, rapidly takes the new Mac mini from a good price to a nuts price

New comment by darreninthenet in "Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence"

darreninthenet — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 21:27:21 +0000

Same in the UK

New comment by darreninthenet in "Seven books I keep close because I love them"

darreninthenet — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 16:10:54 +0000

Are you in the USA? It's because Roget as a title isn't trademarked there so it's accepted as a name for any thesaurus.

If you want the latest edition of the "real" Roget's, it's the one published by Longman.

New comment by darreninthenet in "London’s most equidistant pub"

darreninthenet — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 12:16:07 +0000

ULU is gone now, University of London scrapped it

New comment by darreninthenet in "Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey"

darreninthenet — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 16:44:49 +0000

Playing Devils Advocate... isn't this the government taking action?

New comment by darreninthenet in "The US ambassador had Belgian police stop our reporting"

darreninthenet — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 12:25:50 +0000

Depends on the laws in Belgium (I've no idea what they are)... in the UK for example trespass by itself is not a criminal matter, even if somebody refuses to leave your property... they need to be doing something else.

New comment by darreninthenet in "PlayStation Is Deleting 551 Movies from Customers' Accounts"

darreninthenet — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 22:43:40 +0000

Would likely win in the UK as we have an unfair terms regulation, a small claims court could easily rule it an unfair as any reasonable consumer would assume they were purchasing the movie to watch whenever they want to.

New comment by darreninthenet in "How Madrid built its metro cheaply (2024)"

darreninthenet — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 07:28:02 +0000

The UK used to have that with its railway projects - the old government owned British Rail had massive and extensive knowledge on large rail infrastructure projects and no need for expensive external "consultants". That all got lost when the Tories tore it apart into private companies... hopefully now they are being renationalised as their contracts expire, at some point in the future they can regain all that expertise in-house again.

New comment by darreninthenet in "Driver accused of DUI tracks missing laptop to Illinois State trooper's house"

darreninthenet — Mon, 11 May 2026 13:48:28 +0000

In the UK it's done by breathalyser and refusing is itself an offence.