ranko

9 ms·

31.
by ranko 5y ago
See also the discussion from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28603398
32.
by ranko 5y ago
Book titles in British English tend to be title case (capitalise most words, apart from "a", "the", etc), but newspaper headlines are usually sentence case apart from tabloid front pages, which are all caps and have thei
33.
by ranko 5y ago
Which is presumably taken from Yeats' "Second Coming" (Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world". https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-sec
34.
by ranko 5y ago
less has its own system of bookmarks: use m followed by a lowercase letter to set a mark and single quote followed by a single letter to jump to that mark. I assume that this means we can have up to 26 bookmarks, though I normally don'
35.
by ranko 5y ago
In the UK, cyclists are responsible for between 2 and 3 pedestrian deaths each year. The total number of people killed on UK roads in the year to June 2020 was 1580 ( https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/u
36.
by ranko 5y ago
There's the (controversial) concept of "Risk Compensation", which covers some of the same ground; when we feel safer driving (eg, when we start wearing a seatbelt), we unconsciously compensate by driving with slightly less ca
37.
by ranko 6y ago
In a lovely interview from last year 'My ties to England have loosened': John le Carré on Britain, Boris and Brexit ( https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/11/john-le-carre-... ), he discuss
38.
Red Pill, Blue Pill: James Meek on the Conspiracist Mind(lrb.co.uk)
2 points by ranko 6y ago|0 comments
39.
by ranko 6y ago
There are a couple of great anecdotes about Glass working at other jobs while starting out as a composer, one involving the art critic of Time magazine and another about driving a taxi. https://interlude.hk/philip-glass-comp
40.
by ranko 6y ago
Hilbert died in 1943, so his copyright will have expired at the end of 2013 in many countries, including the UK and US Courant died in 1973, so his copyright will expire at the end of 2043.
41.
by ranko 6y ago
Wikipedia has, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Courant : Courant left Germany in 1933, earlier than many Jewish escapees. He did not lose his position due to being Jewish, as his previous service as a front-lin
42.
Abstract Nonsense(en.wikipedia.org)
2 points by ranko 6y ago|0 comments
43.
by ranko 6y ago
According to https://www.therobbinscompany.com/projects/the-channel-tunne... : "In December 1990, the French and British TBMs [tunnel boring machines] met in the middle and completed the Channel Service Tunnel bore
44.
by ranko 6y ago
I'm not sure that the statistics bear that out: https://beyondthekerb.org.uk/laws-whos-breaking-what/
45.
by ranko 6y ago
For context, this series of radio programmes is presented by a former director of the British Museum and features 100 objects from the collection of the museum (full list here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/ab
46.
by ranko 7y ago
Interesting question - I don't think that there's a current British accent that would rhyme those two words, and 1834 seems too late for the Great Vowel Shift to have made any difference between then and now. Not every rhyme in th
47.
by ranko 7y ago
I'm not sure that I agree, given that those 3,000 years encompass the beginnings of (amongst other things) Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, as well as the development of printing, explosives, and algebra.
48.
The Apple icons you see today have surprisingly ancient roots(qz.com)
2 points by ranko 7y ago|0 comments
49.
by ranko 7y ago
There's a lot of wrong-headed antipathy towards improving cycling infrastructure, which is really frustrating, given that it's a low-cost way of making a big difference to quality of life. I recently read a nice article laying out
50.
by ranko 7y ago
Equidistant from freezing point.
51.
by ranko 8y ago
If you like The Wake , you might also enjoy Riddley Walker ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riddley_Walker ), which uses an imaginary psuedo-iron-age dialect transcribed phonetically: "On my naming day when I come
52.
by ranko 8y ago
Roald Dahl's daughter Olivia caught measles when she was seven. His account of it always makes me cry: "one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out
53.
by ranko 8y ago
Turnout is normally given as a percentage, I think. Either way, the 1992 general election had a turnout of 77.7% or 33,614,074, both of were larger than the EU referendum.
54.
by ranko 8y ago
I keep hearing this claim, but I don't think it's true. "The highest turnout recorded at a UK general election over the last 100 years was in 1950, 83.9%.", according to https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk
55.
by ranko 8y ago
That's the top answer ( https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-of-the-worst-academic-pa... ) - and deservedly so!
56.
by ranko 8y ago
The stopping distance at 166mph is about a quarter of a mile in good conditions!
57.
by ranko 8y ago
Though they are interesting in the context of a discussion of the relative safety of kernels written in C and Rust.
58.
by ranko 8y ago
The jury shouldn't be deciding legal questions - that's for the judge. A jury is supposed to come to their verdict on a consideration of "matters of fact" (a term of art in the law). For example, the definition of a part
59.
by ranko 8y ago
He doesn't have the luxury of accepting bad pull requests. I don't agree that this means he has to be abrasive or abusive.
60.
by ranko 8y ago
You're probably thinking of Daniel Stenberg of curl fame: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/11/14/i-have-toyota-corola/

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