Hacker News: willyt

New comment by willyt in "Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras"

willyt — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 22:15:32 +0000

Your voting system is shit. It results in a two party state. If one party fails to present a coherent offering and the other one is infiltrated by nut jobs then the system breaks down. After all, if it was such a good system, why didn’t you impose it on Germany and Japan when you won WW2? (This comment is politically neutral; who the incoherents and the nut jobs are are left to the reader’s discretion)

New comment by willyt in "Try and"

willyt — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 15:53:44 +0000

And also ignoring British English (and probably other international Englishes too); writing ‘try put’, ‘go put’ or ‘go see’ for example would get a red mark and a correction from the teacher in the UK.

New comment by willyt in "Try and"

willyt — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 15:36:28 +0000

‘Try and’ is correct British English and the Register is a UK publication. If the author had written ‘to try make’ they would have gotten in trouble with their editor and ‘to try to make’ doesn’t flow as well, to my eyes at least.

New comment by willyt in "Try and"

willyt — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 14:04:55 +0000

But you would have your essay corrected if you wrote “go put” in any British school (and possibly other ‘commonwealth’ countries) but it’s fine to say it in informal speech; sometimes we hint at ‘and’ by saying the ‘n’ and sometimes we don’t in regional dialects. In the US you would have “go and put” corrected if you wrote it in an essay. So there is a meaningful difference.

New comment by willyt in "Try and"

willyt — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 11:32:19 +0000

In written British English it would be correct grammar to say “try and” or “go and”. In speech it would be said “go’n” with very little emphasis on the ‘n’ and some dialects drop the ‘n’ completely but would still write ‘and’. I suspect that this would also be true for other dialects of English from NZ, Australia, South Africa, Ireland, India etc but I stand to be corrected.

New comment by willyt in "Try and"

willyt — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 11:00:32 +0000

Yes, I would understand it and that’s probably what people naturally say informally where I live in Scotland and in other dialects it’s said more like ‘go’n put your shoes on’ where the ‘n’ is very soft. But especially if I saw it in writing I would assume that they were not a native British English speaker. It’s interesting. In America I presume it’s not grammatically correct to say ‘the police officer went got his gun and shot killed the suspect’ so why does US English drop the ‘and’ from go (and) or try (and)? Curious. (Edit with some observations about dropping letters from and)

New comment by willyt in "Try and"

willyt — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 10:46:25 +0000

‘Go and put your shoes on’ is correct British English. We consider ‘Go put your shoes on’ as incorrect grammar. So ‘try and put your shoes on’ would also be natural. I’m trying to think what other verbs this would work with because ‘find and put your shoes on’ doesn’t sound right in British English but neither does ‘find put your shoes on’ in US English perhaps someone who understands grammar better can explain why some verbs work with this construction and some don’t.

New comment by willyt in "Introduction to Indian English"

willyt — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 10:51:43 +0000

That is a common usage in British English as well. E.g “I will update the draft document and revert back to you”.

One of the most annoying things about Duolingo is that they haven’t spared a week of an intern’s time to come up with a way of substituting the British/Indian/Irish/Austrailian/New Zealand/South African… word for the American English word. OK there’s a lot of slang out there and you could really go down a rabbit hole but when the usage is well documented in e.g. Collins-Robert there’s no excuse really.

New comment by willyt in "Why English doesn't use accents"

willyt — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 22:05:40 +0000

I’ve been learning french and for the most part once you learn that you just start but don’t finish saying the last letter of any word and you understand which letters you don’t pronounce on the end of the verb that change between je/il/elle/on (usually the last one) and ils/elles (usually the last 3) it’s not that hard. To test my pronunciation I can read a french word I’ve never heard before and have a pretty good chance that the apple speech recognition in notes will get it or conversly I can hear it and have a good chance of spelling it correctly. By contrast I am a native British English speaker, I have two postgraduate degrees, I can read the ‘dearest creature in creation’ poem perfectly and still there are words I would avoid saying in a professional or academic context for fear of saying them wrong and looking ignorant. And good luck pronouncing the name of any UK town or village correctly. What is hard about french is remembering if something is masculine or feminine.

New comment by willyt in "A brief history of hardware epidemics"

willyt — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 17:22:35 +0000

I got an electric shock plugging in a zip drive once. They used to arc when you plugged the mains cord into the back of the drive or the power brick, I forget which.

New comment by willyt in "Why we still can't stop plagiarism in undergraduate computer science (2018)"

willyt — Sun, 01 Jun 2025 10:44:51 +0000

Couldn't you have an exam room with raspberry pi's flashed with a fresh install of debian (or whatever) and no internet and just say you are allowed to lookup anything that's preinstalled on the system plus a PDF of the go to reference for whatever language you are asking them to program in.

New comment by willyt in "Insurers launch cover for losses caused by AI chatbot errors"

willyt — Tue, 13 May 2025 21:43:32 +0000

Yes. I would say it probably makes more sense that whoever designed the chatbot system for the airline will need indemnity insurance. Then the airline has somewhere to go if it starts giving out free plane tickets willy nilly.

New comment by willyt in "I use zip bombs to protect my server"

willyt — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 21:44:42 +0000

Static site with Jekyll?

New comment by willyt in "I won't connect my dishwasher to your cloud"

willyt — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 09:10:30 +0000

I was quite surprised to discover that I couldn’t interact at all with my home battery without internet. I wanted to see how much power is left in it during a power cut but because in a power cut there’s no internet the app didn’t work. Interestingly the cell tower goes out after about two hours of power out and the landline goes after about 9 hours so I didn’t realise until quite far in that this would happen.

New comment by willyt in "ACARS Drama"

willyt — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 09:18:50 +0000

The ones recorded in the US probably are legal to listen to and the ones in the UK probably are not. I think I remember reading somewhere that it’s not legal to record ATC in the UK. IANAL SIUKRTCL

New comment by willyt in "OpenCloud 1.0"

willyt — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 23:27:26 +0000

Been running nextcloud on a raspberry pi 4 on prem for a very small business <5 users for about 3-4 years ish. It’s faster than most clouds because it’s local. I’ve had very little trouble with it. Don’t tend to use much the features apart from files sync though.

New comment by willyt in "Xylella Fastidiosa: A crisis brewing in Europe's olive groves"

willyt — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 15:39:13 +0000

I wonder what the legal implications are of ignoring a disease until it spreads to your neighbour's farm. Can the neighbour sue for negligence or something?

New comment by willyt in "Australian Parliament bans social media for under-16s"

willyt — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 08:44:42 +0000

Apologies you’re right, I looked it up but my brain had obviously already decided it was NSW as that’s what I wrote. It’s a great interview, he seems like a good guy.

New comment by willyt in "Australian Parliament bans social media for under-16s"

willyt — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 08:04:37 +0000

There’s an interview on The Rest is Politics Leading podcast with the politician Peter Malinauskas the premier of New South Wales who started the introduction of this law in his state first. I think it was maybe then taken up by the federal government.

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/leading/id1665265193?i...

It’s very insightful and from listening to this it seems unlikely that murdoch was a huge influence on this.

New comment by willyt in "The size of BYD's factory"

willyt — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 18:48:13 +0000

Citations please. I believe the opposite of much of what you said is true. Here are my references.

SNCF is profitable: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2023/02/24/sncf-re...

Pre-pandemic the main intercity routes were all private operated. The operators had to pay track access charges to cover maintenance costs but they also had to bid to the government to buy the rights to operate the franchise. I.e they had to say how much profit per train service they were willing to pay to the government for the right to operate. The privatised rail sector collapsed because these companies overbid for these rights not because the routes themselves were fundamentally unprofitable.

TFL operating surplus: https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/media/press-releases/2023/march/...

Japan has never closed a shinkansen route. They have closed many rural branch lines though.

Britain has a low immigration rate compared to Europe. E.g net gain ~750k compared to 1.9m to Germany last year. Germany also has high rates of unemployment for unskilled labour yet they have a sophisticated and highly automated high tech manufacturing economy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration#/media/File%3ANe...