Hacker News: pilchard123

New comment by pilchard123 in "The UN challenges five centuries of cartography"

pilchard123 — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 09:16:54 +0000

Originally it was defined like that, but it was fairly quickly redefined as the distance between marks on a prototype platinum bar. It's had a couple of other definitions since then, but it's currently defined "by taking the fixed numerical value of the speed of light in vacuum c to be 299 792 458 when expressed in the unit ms⁻¹, where the second is defined in terms of the caesium frequency ΔνCs".

https://www.bipm.org/en/si-base-units/metre

New comment by pilchard123 in "Furiosa: 3.5x efficiency over H100s"

pilchard123 — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 10:11:55 +0000

Because, as xkcd 169 says, communicating badly and then actung smug when you're misunderstood is not cleverness. "Orders of magnitude" refers to a decimal system in the vast majority of uses (I must admit I have no concrete data on this, but I can find plenty of references to it being base-10 and only a suggestion that it could be sometihng else).

Unless you've explicitly stated that you mean something else, people have no reason to think that you mean something else.

New comment by pilchard123 in "California law forces Netflix, Hulu to turn down ad volumes"

pilchard123 — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 12:33:16 +0000

Some German publishers used to to that for books too, apparently. I've heard at least of cases of it happening to Terry Pratchet and Iain Banks (possibly because they wrote SF/F, which as we all know is not real literature).

https://gmkeros.wordpress.com/2011/09/02/terry-pratchett-and...

New comment by pilchard123 in "Baldur's Gate 3 Steam Deck – Native Version"

pilchard123 — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 10:30:22 +0000

Or even "it has a trivial bug/doesn't run as well as i think it should/insulted my home decor, you die now"

New comment by pilchard123 in "NASA reconnected with Voyager 1 after a brief pause"

pilchard123 — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 12:42:12 +0000

Alec? Is that you?

New comment by pilchard123 in "NASA reconnected with Voyager 1 after a brief pause"

pilchard123 — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 12:40:35 +0000

Sure, but if the exec in question has moved on to another company by then, what do they care?

New comment by pilchard123 in "How to get root access to your Sleep Number bed"

pilchard123 — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 12:38:35 +0000

Shouldn't "bed as a service" be a hotel?

New comment by pilchard123 in "Logitech mouse and keyboard users are getting a free AI upgrade"

pilchard123 — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 12:27:12 +0000

What's unfortunate about the name?

New comment by pilchard123 in "Diamonds Suck"

pilchard123 — Mon, 13 Nov 2023 13:14:46 +0000

At what point does something become part of a tradition or culture? Why does "it started as an ad campaign" preclude something from becoming part of culture?

New comment by pilchard123 in "Beg Bounties (2021)"

pilchard123 — Mon, 13 Nov 2023 12:26:58 +0000

IIRC some jurisdictions consider any force at all - such as pushing an already-open door further open - to be sufficient to make it B&E rather than simply trespassing.

New comment by pilchard123 in "Are we doing this again? Yes, we're doing this again"

pilchard123 — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 12:02:55 +0000

There is a Douglas Adams quote from 1999 similar to that:

> I don't think anybody would argue now that the Internet isn’t becoming a major factor in our lives. However, it's very new to us. Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people "over the Internet." They don’t bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans "over a cup of tea," though each of these was new and controversial in their day.

https://douglasadams.com/dna/19990901-00-a.html

New comment by pilchard123 in "Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts"

pilchard123 — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 13:48:07 +0000

In some a case going to the Ombudsman costs the bank regardless of the outcome.

In the UK the first three cases in a year are free, but from the fourth onward the bank has to pay £750 [1]. It doesn't matter the outcome is - the customer could be totally innocent or the next Bernie Madoff - the bank has to pay. A customer saying "I will get the Ombudsman involved" is heard by the bank as "if we don't make this go away right now, we will get charged £750 (plus any compensation the Ombudsman may award)". It does tend to make them sit up and take notice, I hear, presumably because banks get a lot of complaints and so a large bill.

[1]: https://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/businesses/resolving-...

New comment by pilchard123 in "Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source"

pilchard123 — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 12:19:13 +0000

Not even all of Weta - only the digital VFX bit.

New comment by pilchard123 in "Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents"

pilchard123 — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 15:00:32 +0000

It also made me think of 'By the Waters of Babylon' by Stephen Vincent Benét. Wikipedia tells me it was also (indeed, originally) published as 'The Place of the Gods'.

New comment by pilchard123 in "Embrace the Grind"

pilchard123 — Fri, 09 Apr 2021 22:25:58 +0000

Never become the guy who can fix the printer.