Hacker News: takno

New comment by takno in "‘The Trains Are Slower Because They Slowed the Trains Down’"

takno — Wed, 14 Mar 2018 01:41:15 +0000

If you're counting HSTs then everything on the east coast, plus great Eastern main line, the sleepers, East Midlands HSTs, Chilterns trains, 4 xc sets, the new transpennine sets that are being built, a few Cumbrian coast services, and within a few weeks the great western pocket rocket HSTs and the scotrail ones. Less popular than they used to be, but very rare is overstating it a bit

New comment by takno in "Ask HN: Ubuntu Desktop Default Apps"

takno — Sat, 22 Jul 2017 14:19:26 +0000

Absolutely agree that it's a horrible IDE. Java 9 has better HiDPI support in Linux though, so it may get a little better in the future

New comment by takno in "How MTA shut down my app for Penn Station commuters"

takno — Thu, 13 Jul 2017 16:36:07 +0000

There are maps of many more routes at traksy https://traksy.uk/live/M+2+CARLILE

New comment by takno in "Making Your Own URL Shortener"

takno — Sat, 20 May 2017 15:10:35 +0000

If the shortener is tied to a site than why is that risk any greater than the risk of the site itself being abandoned?

New comment by takno in "Making Your Own URL Shortener"

takno — Sat, 20 May 2017 14:02:32 +0000

The only thing that really bothers me personally about shorteners is not knowing where I'm going to end up, and not being able to identify articles I've read before. A shortener with a dedicated domain and user-chosen ids should cover that just fine. The only outstanding issue in the article is a single extra DNS lookup, which is pretty minor compared to the massive chains which were causing the problem.

New comment by takno in "No tipping means better business"

takno — Tue, 27 Dec 2016 15:38:44 +0000

What would generally happen if you tried that in a place that stated they didn't accept tips in the UK would probably be that you'd be smiled at, your money would go in a charity tin and the server would make a mental note to serve you last next time. I suspect your ego would then simply reject the obviously bad service you received the next time and you would convince yourself that you had somehow benefited rather than accept that your previous actions were arrogant, culturally imperialistic and unwise.

New comment by takno in "Ibuprofen May Not Be as Safe as was Thought"

takno — Wed, 16 Nov 2016 16:02:06 +0000

The suggestion from the paper (and indeed the body of the article) is that Celecoxib is safer than was being assumed, and very much not that Ibuprofen is more dangerous than was being assumed. In that sense it's a good news article with a bad-news headline needlessly attached.

New comment by takno in "Reasons not to use Uber"

takno — Sat, 12 Nov 2016 17:29:49 +0000

A more accurate description would probably be "pretending to monetize surplus capacity while actually enabling misallocation of scarce resources"

New comment by takno in "Berlin Is Bringing Back Subway Trains from the 1950s"

takno — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 03:01:21 +0000

Have Vivarail managed to find any customers yet? From an engineering point of view what they knocked together looked quite good, but for the UK market right now it's just a disaster. You can't spend billions upgrading London trains, and then suggest knocking together some franken-pacer out of London's scraps to replace the terrible units in the north and west-country.

New comment by takno in "Apple Sucks Now, Here’s a ThinkPad Buyer’s Guide"

takno — Fri, 28 Oct 2016 21:50:52 +0000

Ubuntu nags you to do it so it can run 3rd party drivers. It's never really explained what the drivers were and I haven't noticed any difference with it disabled or not

New comment by takno in "George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’"

takno — Fri, 28 Oct 2016 20:45:01 +0000

The fine was up to $21k per day subject to a maximum of $105k

New comment by takno in "Skateboard, Bike, Car: Building Products the MetaLab Way"

takno — Wed, 26 Oct 2016 13:11:57 +0000

I've never understood this. How do you turn a skateboard into a car without starting again completely? Seems like instead of building one thing in considered stages you've built four things and resolutely refused to plan any of them properly

New comment by takno in "After Almost a Century, the 2nd Avenue Subway Is Close to Arriving"

takno — Wed, 26 Oct 2016 13:01:23 +0000

Sadly the current proposal seems to be to extend PATH to the same station so you still have to take the infuriatingly terrible monorail. Honestly they'd probably be better off spending some money running the monorail straight over the scrapyard/parking lot instead of taking a massive curve at 2mph

New comment by takno in "Apple Has Removed Dash from the App Store"

takno — Thu, 06 Oct 2016 11:06:16 +0000

They are mainly regulated because they naturally form into monopolies, just like the large internet services.

New comment by takno in "China has built an elevated bus that travels above car traffic"

takno — Thu, 04 Aug 2016 13:37:05 +0000

The picture you link to is probably exactly what the original author had in mind. It has mostly wooden bodywork and a metal subframe which in the event of a collision is given to riding up onto the carriage in front and killing everybody. They were literal death traps.

In practice there were half a dozen non-structural reasons to move to less doors including automatic doors being much safer, disabled accessibility and simply that those trains were cold.

New comment by takno in "It’s cheaper to build multiple native applications than one responsive web app"

takno — Thu, 09 Jun 2016 20:42:05 +0000

This seems like a misunderstanding of the tech. Service workers can really only fire up when they get a push notification, which you have to explicitly opt into, or when the page is running in the browser.

The processing allowed is tightly controlled, and even with permission the push notification can't do anything behind your back - it has to result in a visible notification which will alert you that there's something you want to disable.

New comment by takno in "It’s cheaper to build multiple native applications than one responsive web app"

takno — Thu, 09 Jun 2016 20:38:11 +0000

backdrop-filter tends to go in my not-very-nice-to-have bucket. It's certainly something you can live fairly comfortably without.

Service workers are more of an issue - realistically if you want to build a serious web-app for iPhone right now you're going to have to build a shim around it for notifications and offline, although that can be quite small.

If you are aiming to provide a worthwhile experience to the users who will never install your app, or need some serious selling first then you need something on the web, so you are going to have a mobile site. Building a lightweight service-worker shim around that for iPhone and providing a couple of browser-specific stylesheets ought to be less work than full native apps.

New comment by takno in "It’s cheaper to build multiple native applications than one responsive web app"

takno — Thu, 09 Jun 2016 20:07:50 +0000

A lot of the issues here are with mobile Safari. I agree it completely sucks just due to how behind Safari are with ES6. On the upside the work is complete to fix this in dev releases, so there's a very good chance that we're 3 months or so away from a large step change. I'm not planning on releasing anything in the next 3 months, so that timetable is okay for me, YMMV

New comment by takno in "Being sued, in East Texas, for using the Google Play Store [video]"

takno — Thu, 09 Jun 2016 01:27:18 +0000

What is missing in your estimation?

New comment by takno in "Ootside – Weather from a brutally honest Scottish perspective"

takno — Tue, 07 Jun 2016 15:21:47 +0000

Doesn't work for me in Firefox