Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | jve's commentslogin

And 7kW-10kW water heater right INSIDE of your shower, right?

I was amazed that a socket couldn't be installed for the purpose of LED mirror that is a meter away from shower, but they seem to be fine at running water heater inside shower in UK.


My shower is on the hot water system, not electric.

But for fixed stuff like the light, yes, it meets IP standards. If you meet the right standards you can of course have electrics in splash domes. A standard socket is not going to meet those ingress protection ratings.

A socket 1m away from a shower is likely to have wet hands plugging things in.


I see Italy plug is not "within depth"... Don't think I'd like it.

Swiss seems to care how you orient the plug.

Anyways, haven't used them - maybe Italy has also a socket that provides more support apart from inserted pins.


Is there a human that can read that dark blue on black or is it just us who has their eyes wired differently?

I have to select that text to change the background to read it.


No one can and people have been complaining about it for decades.

But there is no standard or standard body anywhere for terminal colors so there is no obvious way to improve this situation.

And no urgency either, because all terminal emulators allow users to customize the palette anyway.


If I was the maintainer of a terminal emulator, I would see a quite obvious way to improve the situation for my users: change the default colors so that dark blue is brighter.

There's no obvious way to unilaterally improve the situation across the whole ecosystem, that's true. But I don't understand why individual terminal emulator maintainers don't fix it for their users.


Because it means making choices, breaking assumptions, etc.. They have made it user-customizable so they don't have to go through all that.

FWIW, the current de-facto standard is set by xterm. Here is a relevant excerpt of its source code:

    ! Disclaimer: there are no standard colors used in terminal emulation.
    !
    ! The choice for color4 and color12 is a tradeoff between contrast, depending
    ! on whether they are used for text or backgrounds.  Note that either color4 or
    ! color12 would be used for text, while only color4 would be used for a
    ! background.  These are treated specially, since the luminosity of blue is
    ! only about half that of red/green, and is typically not accounted for in the
    ! RGB scheme.
    !
    ! Blue text on a black background should be readable.
    ! Blue backgrounds should not be "too" bright.
    !
    ! Originally color4/color12 were set to the names blue3/blue
    !*VT100*color4: blue3
    !*VT100*color12: blue
    !
    ! They are from rgb.txt respectively:
    !  0   0 205  blue3
    !  0   0 255  blue
    ! However, blue3 is not readable on a black background.
    !
    ! Another choice was from the Debian settings:
    !*VT100*color4: DodgerBlue1
    !*VT100*color12: SteelBlue1
    !
    ! From rgb.txt:
    ! 30 144 255  DodgerBlue1
    ! 99 184 255  SteelBlue1
    !
    ! Some users object to this choice because the background (color4) is brighter
    ! than they are accustomed.  Others point out that the different weights for
    ! the red/green components make it appear to be not really blue.  Finally, it
    ! provides poor contrast against color13 and color14.
    !
    ! The current choice uses equal weights for red/green (effectively adding a
    ! gray to the result).  It is brighter than the original choice, and provides
    ! more contrast between color12 and color13, color14 than SteelBlue1 did.
    ! Contrast of color4 against black is slightly improved over the original.
    !
    ! Some refinement is certainly possible (you are welcome to try) -TD
Make that what you will :-).


Running a software project means making choices. Currently, the choice is made to make blue text unreadable. That's not a great choice, in my opinion.


> the current de-facto standard is set by xterm.

That’s true for 256 colour and various other escape codes too. But I wouldn’t say it’s true for 16 colour pallet.


Quite a few terminal emulators do this already. Including the one I maintain.


There are fewer blue cones in the fovea centralis than there are in the surrounding parts of the macula, so humans can't resolve details as well in blue light.


The sensitivity of S cones is also simply much lower than that of the M cones. It's clear that pure (0, 0, 1) blue is perceived as vastly darker than pure (0, 1, 0) green. Blue light must be about 10x brighter (in linear intensity) than green light to be perceived as equally bright; the brightest full-saturation blue in sRGB looks about as bright as the very dark green (0, 0.1, 0). The contrast on black background is incredibly poor.


Which is why people who understand color tend to add a bit of green in to make a color which still looks deep blue but is much brighter than what #00f looks like


There is a phenomenon where I call things blue where my wife call things green.

Now reading your comment perhaps that's why? And some eyes would gladly distinguish green rather than blue?


Speaking of shortcuts... yesterday I noticed that excel online opens in a localized version.. and with grey letters it tells what shortcut to use to jump to search bar: Alt+Ē

Meh... non-ascii chars as hotkeys maybe work in some languages, but not mine where I have to press silent letter (Apostrophe) to make e -> ē, but it doesn't work within shortcuts: ALT + (' + E)


> 5. Snow is easiest to shovel when it’s just fallen. The more time passes, the more freeze-thaw cycles – even gentle ones – build up and make the fallen snow denser and tougher. (This might be less true in very cold places where it never gets above freezing during the day? I don’t know, honestly.)

If it is very cold and no freeze-thaw cycle, the snow is very... Dry and grainy and still OK for shoveling.

But yes, the puffy stuff just fallen from sky is very nice for shoveling.


As I am someone from EU, please explain me what can you do with this SSN number?

I mean is it like a unique database row id which happens to be a non-changeable-lifetime password which is stored in multiple places in plain-text and you can use it to... "unlock some doors"? Make legally binding agreements remotely... ? Or what?

Or it is PII - privately identifying information which is more of a privacy issue here?


It's used for all sorts of "prove you are who you are" situations. It's most commonly associated with applying for credit/loans, and taxes, but definitely not limited to those things. It's ridiculous that an immutable 8-digit number + name is used for authentication in the USA. It even says on the card "FOR SOCIAL SECURITY AND TAX PURPOSES - NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION" but apparently we've all lost our minds and ignore that. It can be very difficult to go through business processes if you refuse to give your SSN - some healthcare providers will just refuse to serve you.

With it, people can take out loans in your name, get into your accounts, file fake tax returns and get tax refunds in your name, and generally act as if they're you. Things are getting a little better nowadays (with additional information required) but we still don't have a secure method of identification online / over the phone.


Over here we use a PKI cert for that. A smartcard providing the root of that trust is provided by the government after verifying your identity using the typical stuff used for identity documents (any biometric data on file, birth certificate, etc.). That still doesn't mean that it's impossible to steal an identity, or acquire a made up one, but it does make it a whole lot harder.


The thing about social security is that it was supposed to be used for a fairly narrow system, and the physical cards even have text like "not to be used as identification" on them. And then we used it for that anyway


The German equivalent to the SSN in it's ubiquity, the "federal tax id", is illegal to use for non-tax purposes.

As a German that feels about correct.


SSN is technically the same. The Social Security Act, actually has that point explicitly called out. Did anyone listen? Nope.


Do they have penalties in the 5+ digits for each such offense?


Wouldn't matter. No one is interested in enforcing it, and there is too much value in the datapoint to credit rating agencies to tear the entire edifice down. Hell, back in 2011, I was part of a group migrating away from SSN usage at the Federal level. The biggest delay? Waiting for another semantically compatible I'd to manifest. TIN (taxpayer identification number) could be synthetically combined with a couple other ID's in the dataset such that they could finally retire the SSN's we weren't supposed to be using in the first place.


Basically in the EU, you usually have an ID card (or a passport/driving license/visa card, they're recorded on all of those too) that has a combination of a citizen ID and a document ID. Both of these details are combined considered to be "you" for the purposes of anything to do with the government. The government has a registration of every citizen ID+document ID combination and knows as a result what documents are in circulation. They're technically not required in most of Europe, although you must be able to procure one at request for legal reasons (ie. getting your employment properly sorted, opening a bank account, or a law enforcement official asking for your identity). Revoking a combination is as easy as getting a new ID card/passport since the combination is what counts. ID documents also usually expire eventually, so there's also an inherent time limit to what a leaked combination can cause issues with.

They're also as I understand it, used to handle things like sending everyone voter IDs for elections in advance; this is how the government knows who to send the voting cards to.

Bafflingly, the US does NOT have a national identification method that works like this. There's no country-wide identity document that provides the same assurances. As a result, most US entities (government branches & corporations) have settled on a "closest possible"... which is the social security number. A number that's used to identify every person with attachment to the US in some form since social security is something every US citizen has to interact with. (It also includes a ton of non-citizens since as I understand it, social security is something foreign workers also have to interact with, but that's besides the point.) It's a 9 character long numeric string that identifies you as a person... and has almost no revocation mechanism, even if it ends up in a data breach.

Yet in spite of this, it's still used as a country-wide ID mechanism for a lot of different things and replacing it with a proper ID mechanism has as I understand it (not American) very poor support as it's a culture war issue.


It's often used as a way to verify identity. Historically it's been one of the more secret pieces of information about someone, so while name and birthday are not very secret, if someone wanted to steal an identity, it's generally the SSN that is hardest to figure out. As a result though, I think a lot of places treat it as "If you know the SSN, then you are who you say you are."


As an example, if you call your bank to report a lost credit card, and that you'd like it shipped to a different address than the one you registered with them, they'll ask you for the last 4 digits of your SSN.

So yeah, someone who knows (name, SSN) or especially (name, address, phone, SSN) can do a lot of harm.


Yes, to all of the above, unfortunately


> Tesla never refreshes their models

I'v seen quite a few Tesla Ys that needed repairs and... they seem to improve the car year to year or even months to months. Car interface suddenly changes to RJ45, some metal parts changed to aluminium (if I'm not mistaken), various things that become easyer to fix and so on. Low Voltage battery getting Li-Ion. Front under body changes: https://service.tesla.com/docs/BodyRepair/Body_Repair_Proced...

And then the airbag controller gets newer and newer.

Not something to market about, but you see steady incremental improvements.

What I want to say, the serviceability is very good for the cars. You get open documentation, you can access toolbox for a price, but it's there for the simple DIYer. Need to change pyro fuse? No problem, pop up docs, order part, change it. The parts are cheap.


Don't you need roadside assistance to change a tire still?


Umm... why?


They dont carry spares because of the regenerative breaking if I recall corrrectly? Was a friend tesla owner that told me a while back.


Haven't heard it. People changing tires for winter or just changing because after it was totaled and no one complained about it :)


Changing tires at a shop i not the same as having a blown tire on the side of the road!


Sorry I pressed downvote and cannot revert my press...

I had to set up CF for a small local business in a very small country that has ecommerce presence targeted mainly at local population. It just gets non-stop ongoing traffic a hosting provider cannot handle.


> Sorry I pressed downvote and cannot revert my press...

Next to the timestamp of the comment there is an "undown" link that reverts the vote. Or an "unvote" link if you upvoted


Is standard you are talking about is Multicast DNS https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6762 from year 2013?



There's an interesting coping mechanism (verging on the conspiracy theory) popular on some Polish forums, namely that the abysmal data comes from abundance of sensors combined with them being placed (by whom and why? here's where the conspiracy part kicks in) in the most polluted spots.

Here's a debunk by a popular Polish fact checking portal (in Polish): https://demagog.org.pl/analizy_i_raporty/smog-nie-taki-zly-j...


Until recently, I've been a smog-skeptic; I figured it must be an overblown issue, as regardless of what the digital sensors and pretty graphs say, having spent almost my entire life in Kraków, I never saw it, never felt it. Still don't. Air in Kraków feels perfectly fine to me. And every time I saw someone complain, it was because of "see the PM2.5 PM10 thru the roof omg zomg!", not any actual health-related issues or discomfort.

What changed my mind about the whole thing was my kids. I may not feel the particulates in the air, but my kids do, especially my eldest daughter (who has early childhood asthma, in remission) - winter comes, particulates go up, they start coughing uncontrollably all day. Particulates go down, suddenly they're healthy again (+/- running nose).

I have limited sympathy for conspiracy theories, and very little for those burning trash in their homes, but I do understand where the smog-skepticism comes from. I still remember when Krakowski Alarm Smogowy became a thing, winter 2012; back then, this felt like a huge fad pushed by young activists on the Internet.


> I never saw it, never felt it. Still don't.

I got the same condition for diesel fumes since my military service. Thankfully I remember how dizzy I used to get around fumes but I really have to force myself to avoid fumes now even at the faintest smell since I can endure it ... when people around me start complaining I can't even smell it.

I assume you lived there since childhood and got used to it from that time?


> I assume you lived there since childhood and got used to it from that time?

Yes. Born and raised in Kraków, spent maybe 5 years living elsewhere in total.


I don't mean this in a bad way but, have you visited other countries? I'm Spanish but lived for about half a year in Krakow, and the difference is just so stark I can't imagine skepticism. In winter the air smells burned. Fog is a phenomenon, sure, but what takes place most of winter in Krakow is not fog. It's just smoke.

I didn't know about any of this when I first travelled there, in fact when my boss at the time recommended I got a mask I thought he was paranoid or something. Absolutely not.


I hear you but let me add that what you feel is not necessarily the good indicator.

PM 2.5 does have the potential to trigger asthma & similar stuff but it also causes cancer and heart disease, neither of which can be felt (until it's too late anyway).


My parents were the same until I forced them to install an air purifier, and showed them the filter after running it for one winter (with windows always closed). It was snow white when new, and turned black after four cold months (not grey or dark grey, but literally black).


Actually, if the PM2.5 and PM10 are high, you can see it very easily.

If you can't see it, that means the air isn't polluted. Obviously some people confuse fog with smog, or can't see haze in some situations (failure to see).

But it's always there and always visible. You can't have pollutions at that scale and not see them.


To be frank, having a poorly functioning sense of smell is not exactly a great excuse for ignorance. Are you rejecting everything that you can't verify with your (or your relatives') senses?


Well, the map obviously does a lot of extrapolation. Look at Norway, for example. The bigger cities pollute the air in a 50km radius? In a country where heating is primarily electric? When Berlin and Paris don't seem to affect the air quality 20km away, despite having ten times the population?


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: