Hacker News: srb24

New comment by srb24 in "Gmail will no longer support checking emails from third-party accounts via POP"

srb24 — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 08:10:33 +0000

POP is not perfect (could a new version be created - POP4??) but IMAP is not always the solution. For one thing it makes switching mail provider very hard when you haven't got a copy of all your historic emails - with POP you just change settings and away you go. Ms are also always trying to turn off POP access for the Office Outlook program. Hmmmmmm It's almost as if both they and Google run two of the largest subscription email hosting platforms which would both benefit if it's harder for people to change provider... Of course the less you download the more you have to store on their servers and the more you store the more you pay and of course every day brings more emails to store....

New comment by srb24 in "Peep Show is the most realistic portrayal of evil I have seen (2020)"

srb24 — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 07:40:08 +0000

Do you have to live quite so relentlessly in the real world?

New comment by srb24 in "Microsoft’s original source code"

srb24 — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 06:11:40 +0000

i thought they started by writing traffic control software, where's that source code? :)

New comment by srb24 in "Ross Anderson has died"

srb24 — Sun, 31 Mar 2024 07:28:18 +0000

I still remember an undergrad group project at Cambridge where we were in the Computing Lab discussing how we were going to build an online voting system - I said "We can worry about security later...." only to hear a deep Glaswegian brogue behind us "Oh Really?! Tell me more...." as we all turned around in horror. LOL

New comment by srb24 in "Why was the F-117 retired so quickly?"

srb24 — Sat, 15 Jul 2023 06:02:38 +0000

despite the "F" designation it wasn't ever a multi-role fighter (ignoring it's er... trasnsport role in Executive Decision) and nowadays most combat aitcraft can't afford to be so specialised

New comment by srb24 in "Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?"

srb24 — Sat, 11 Feb 2023 08:42:52 +0000

I've been a paid subscriber to Medium for a few years now (I have a lot of writer friends and it seemed a way to support the art) and I think it's great (I'm not afiliated to the company in anyway and not one of their creators) - I read it every day and there's always at least 2-4 interesting articles which is pretty standard compared to other more pricey publications eg. the Financial Times (I read about 20 online titles every day) - I'm not sure why a lot of these commenters seem to think removing a paywall or increasing read free limits will help improve the company, if anything the reverse will happen and these people will probably never pay for anything. I would actually wouldn't mind sensible text style ads added to articles (think eary 21st century Adwords style) if only because if an article gives me an idea then it would be great to then find a relevant solution provider - if YouTube can stuff 2-4 ads in every video then I think you can safely run non intrusive ads though I guess the army of ad blockers might cause issues (something YouTube videos seem immune to) - oh and reopen the API as that would help data driven content generators

New comment by srb24 in "UK faces worst downturn of any advanced economy, OECD says"

srb24 — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 09:08:30 +0000

1. Last time I looked no African country was part of the EU, so not sure how stricter controls for EU nationals works in your plan 2. The Uk wasn't part of the EuroZone so not really on the hook for Greece etc. 3. "a few hits to the City and London area aren't necessarily a bad thing" why wold you think losing one of the most Profitable parts of THE UK a good thing, it won't move to other parts of the UK, it will go to Paris, Frankfurt etc. 4. The average cost for ANY company of ANY size to now gain a sponsor license to employ non UK staff now starts at about £20,000, there are now not enough people to do many jobs especially in cities, labour costs (and now inflation) have risen out of control in many sectors causing closures and many firms are just outsourcing any non in-person to other countries. Yes, it would be great to give jobs to "locals" but not Everyone can do Every job!

New comment by srb24 in "A six-month program in Britain will assess the effects of a shorter workweek"

srb24 — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 05:34:06 +0000

Nice for employees but most succesful Hackers/entrepreneurs I know work 6-7 days a week. Availability is often key rather than actual total hours worked.

New comment by srb24 in "Commercial-Emacs"

srb24 — Fri, 03 Jun 2022 08:31:02 +0000

Great! the worst of both worlds!

What's next? Cats you have to walk outside every day and pick up after?

New comment by srb24 in "My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file (2020)"

srb24 — Fri, 24 Dec 2021 07:08:17 +0000

Me too!

New comment by srb24 in "What's the best SaaS starter kit?"

srb24 — Wed, 06 Oct 2021 17:39:36 +0000

"I'm pretty open for the language" - with the greatest respect you should checkout the relevant cost per hour for freelance devs for various languages - I think you will fimd that PHP generally wins (regardless of its faults) once you start growing hiring staff you may find you've tripled your wage bill if you use something "cool" but not "common" eg Scala, Erlang, Julia etc etc

New comment by srb24 in "We only ever talk about the third attack on Pearl Harbor"

srb24 — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 08:43:08 +0000

It is very odd that the attack is often taught as something just out of the blue - e.g. there was the Japan War Scare of 1906-1907 https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/japan1906.htm and Japanese citizens in the US were bascially treated like 2nd class citizens stoking up a lot of resentment (not that I'm defending the attack or the Japanese military/fascist leadership!)

New comment by srb24 in "Show HN: Beekeeper Studio – open-source, cross-platform SQL client"

srb24 — Fri, 08 May 2020 09:05:39 +0000

great work! TBH Perhaps the best front end for editing tables I've ever used was.... wait for it... Access 2010(!) as you could use it (via ADP) for editing MS SQL Server databases - very quick/easy to edit table content, spell check, easily import/export to tables using excel files, ctrl-f to search, spell check etc. etc. everything I've used sincehas been a lot more powerful but lacked the speed and ease of editing table content.

New comment by srb24 in "Ask HN: Computer Science/History Books?"

srb24 — Sat, 28 Mar 2020 09:25:19 +0000

agreed, also see if you can find the made-for-tv movie adaptation of it "The Pirates Of Silicon Valley"

New comment by srb24 in "Ask HN: Do Udacity nanodegrees get anyone a job without academic background?"

srb24 — Fri, 26 Apr 2019 08:14:10 +0000

I think there is a big difference between an academic course that anyone can take (assuming you can pay or it's free!) and a university course that you need to compete with other students to get a place - employers may like that as indirectly the course has done some pre-screening of candidates for them

New comment by srb24 in "Auto-GCAS Saves Unconscious F-16 Pilot"

srb24 — Thu, 15 Sep 2016 08:58:49 +0000

Didn't the Stuka Dive Bomber have something (admittedly analogue) similar in the 1930's?

New comment by srb24 in "Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?"

srb24 — Sun, 10 Aug 2014 11:35:54 +0000

If you have a great product that you can get live quickly and works then it won't matter if you even write it in COBOL (don't write it in COBOL though) - ASP.Net & SQl Server (even the free version) also work very well together and have great performance.

There are of course licensing costs if you run on Windows and don't use MONO but these shouldn't really be an issue in comparison to all your other costs

Also there are a lot of ASP.Net/C# developers around (just look at odesk) which will help you build your team faster (unlike Ruby or Scala developers, which are great languages, just harder to recruit and also attract higher wages).

My advice... build a proof on concept as quickly as possible - if .net is your thing then use that vs. wasting time learning something else. The chances are that your concept may need to be reworked so why waste time...

Good luck!