Well, okay, show us how to follow those instructions then.
"the :1 is short for :0001 basically" is easy enough: you get 2001::0001::0001.
Then "just put that bit at the very end" -- but which bit? If it means the ":0001", then there's two of them and they can't both go at the very end. If not, then it fails to specify which bit. Either way I don't see how these instructions are followable at all, let alone easily.
Exactly enough to fill out the address, which is always the same length. BTW, IPv4 does basically the same thing. The address 127.1 is equivalent to 127.0.0.1.
Not really the same, the mechanics are different and this particular behaviour is pretty much an accident, not abbreviation.
In IPv4 you also have 127.257 equal to 127.0.1.1, 123456789 equal to 7.91.205.21, and 010.010.010.010 is a well-know DNS server. This notation is also rejected by most implementations.
It is? Those alternate IPv4 notations are all accepted by Linux, FreeBSD, and MacOS. I remember playing around with "alternate notations" 30+ years ago on old SunOS boxes.
I live in a house house exclusively warmed by electric heating (underfloor downstairs, wall-mounted upstairs). The heating system takes electricity as an input and provides heat as an output with no other direct benefits. As a whole the heating system can be quite power-hungry during cold periods.
A crypto mining rig takes electricity as an input and provides heat as an output with the possible benefit of creating some valuable digital assets. Serious crypto mining setups can be quite power-hungry.
Crypto mining for the sole purpose of making money is often considered an egregious and possibly wasteful use of power resources.
Is crypto mining for the purpose of using the heat to warm my house, with the possible benefit of generating valuable digital assets, similarly egregious, wasteful or inconsiderate in some way?
Seriously, I want to know where OP lives, having an all electric heating setup anywhere in the world where it gets cold enough is incredibly inefficient
The town I live in is bisected by a MOD railway and, from what I understand, permission was never granted for whatever was needed to supply natural gas on my side of the tracks. This rules out some of the more common traditional heating systems found in these parts.
We bought the house ~two years ago. The building itself was (and still is) quite sound but was a wreck in terms of features (no heating system at all, no flooring at all, and in terms of a kitchen and bathroom facilities it was quite ... minimal).
My partner had long hoped for underfloor heating downstairs as she loves the feel of walking on warm flooring. I have to agree that it is a delightful luxury and we don't otherwise have too many vices.
Direct electric underfloor heating felt like the least hassle in the long term and the easiest for self-installation. The alternative was a wet underfloor heating system (water filled pipework set in screed). The wet system is capable of leaking and eventually failing with expensive repairs, the electric system less so.
We use infrared wall-mounted heaters upstairs. As far as direct electric heaters go they're quite efficient. They heat the objects in the room rather than the air and it feels like the warmth of the sun on your skin.
I agree wholeheartedly that heat pumps are a more efficient option and could indeed be used as a direct replacement for our upstairs wall-mounted heaters. This is something we hope to put in but was not previously affordable when we were re-working the entire of the inside of the house from nothing.
As far as I understand, we would need a wet system for underfloor heating if we were to utilise heat pumps and at this stage that would be a prohibitively expensive re-work of what we already have.
Hopefully roof-mounted solar and a battery of some sort should even out the costs a bit.
It's pretty common in the Pacific Northwest. Heat pumps are unreasonably expensive here in the US so they're still fairly uncommon and the PNW has abundant, relatively cheap hydro power.
It's been tried and it doesn't work because hardware designed for crypto mining needs to be utilized 100% 24/7 or it won't ever pay back or be meaningful, and it that case you either size it to be such a small heat contribution that you don't mind a small heater on during the hot months, or so big that it is impossible to offset in the summer.
Nevermind the fact that resistive electric heat in this day and age is wildly stupid except for maybe the northernmost parts of Siberia. Why pay X to get A heat plus almost no bitcoin, when you could pay X to get 3A heat using a heat pump?
I've always wondered about this. I think, if the cost is no issue, replacing electric heaters with powerful computers (or crypto miners) is justified and actually beneficial. If you don't like supporting the crypto world you can always run Folding@home or your favourite distributed computing project to contribute to research and heat your home, all with the same amount of electricity.
Of course, buying heat pumps probably has higher ROI than buying crypto miners for heating...
I will admit that is an interesting argument, but it doesn't hold up when applied in the real world.
First off, heating your house directly with electricity is a bad idea. A heat pump could be as much as 4x as efficient as direct heating. Improving the insulation in your house so you don't need as much heating is even better.
After those problems are solved I started to say "If you want to then do the remaining 1/10-as-much-as-before heating by mining bitcoin, then go ahead", but honestly that's still a bad idea because it supports and grows this insanely wasteful industry and that will incentivize other people to build more of these ridiculously wasteful and destructive mining operations.
The nerd part of me thinks bitcoin is super cool. The responsible adult who cares about people other than myself part of me hates it.
I'm left handed and have always used the mouse with my left hand.
The tilt on the cursor has never seemed odd or wrong or strange to me in any way.
I've been using computer mice in one way or another for more than 30 years and perhaps a lack of oddness comes from having so very much gotten used to it. Maybe newer left-handed mouse users would find the cursor tilt strange?
Oh dear. I am left handed and I have not even considered the arrow is tilting the wrong way. Now suddenly it annoys me to no end. I need to replace my cursor ...
35-40 years ago I had to switch to left because of too much strain on the right hand. I was very happy when I found a way to mirror my cursor. Am back to right hand now though.
For a month or two I decided to start using the mouse with my left hand just for fun, to see how ambidextrous I could be.
The "wrong"-pointed cursor annoyed me so much I had to find a utility to flip it. (On a Mac, which doesn't support custom cursors like Windows has since forever.) It seriously drove me nuts otherwise.
So it's really interesting to hear that if it was always that way for you, it doesn't bother you!
I think left handed users do not find it weird as it works in left to right up to down information systems. So unlike with pen they get the same benefit of operating tool sensibly.
The arrow gets replaced with a ... pin with a stylized bird in each end? ... so the arrow does not hide text anyways, when going left to right over text, as a physical pen would do.
Also make it maintain 2 cursor positions and switch between them depending on the mouse. It would be pretty neat with multiple monitors, with focus following the (active) cursor. (Assuming you're ambidextrous, of course :))
The steam deck has a keyboard that supports input from both trackpads at the same time. Always surprised me this is not really supported by most desktop environments.
In 30yrs of IT support, this is a thing I have never seen. If I had, I'd be forever inserting into conversations about end-users. Strictly for the novelty.
Huh. I wonder if there was some (superficially) valid reasoning there for forcing lefthanders to learn write with their right hand. Due to the left-to-right nature of English, and the technology of fountain pens, it really was more objectively difficult to write with your left hand.
I work as a software developer but once trained as a barista when considering opening my own coffee shop. I can offer some fact-based reasoning as to how different coffees have the capacity to taste different (whether people have the capacity to discern the difference is another matter).
The dominant factors in the flavour of coffee comes from the preparation, both the roasting and the brewing.
Roasting reduces the acidity of the beans and draws out oils towards the outer surface. Both the acidity and oil content of the affect the flavour, with the acidity directly impacting bitterness and the oil impacting the smoothness.
The amount of total acidity contributors and oil contributors that are drawn out of the bean when brewing are a direct function of water temperature, water pressure and duration. Too low a temperature and the resulting drink is more akin to watery coffee dust. Too low a pressure and you get sort of the same results.
An ideal temperature and pressure combination, given a fixed duration (let's say 30 seconds) draws out enough of the oils to balance the acidity to get a good strength coffee (optimal bean to drink yield) that doesn't taste horrid. The acidity takes longer to draw out such that too long a duration results in a more bitter (and generally less acceptable) flavour.
That's a rough overview meant only to highlight that it certainly is possible, from both roasting and brewing, to significantly alter the flavour of coffee. I've oversimplified for brevity.
But can differently-grown beans of the same type affect flavour?
I don't grow coffee beans but I do grow tomatoes. From personal experience, the length of growing season, the amount of sunlight and the average temperature across the growing season affect the quality of the fruit. I find the same for sweetcorn, squash and many plants that grow above ground.
I don't think it is a stretch to suggest that the same factors have the capacity to impact the oil content of coffee beans if nothing else.
If growth conditions impact the oil content of the beans and the oil content of the resulting drink impacts the flavour, it seems plausible to suggest that the growth conditions can impact the flavour.
It's a security matter more than a performance matter, although improved performance is a nice side effect.
For assets served from a third party (a CDN), you don't want to send cookies that might include secrets (a session cookie that could allow access to a user's account for example).
You can trust that a third party won't intentionally log or make use of any sensitive information in cookies but you can't guarantee it. Best not to send it at all.
I mean - if you separate your html from your assets security wise, that naturally means they need to be on different hosts, as you cannot really reroute requests before TLS decryption based on paths or any other indicator.
But the motivation to put stuff on a CDN would be to improve performance. If you put your HTML on your own HW and your assets on a CDN for performance reasons, you might want to check if that really pans out, because those extra roundtrips may kill all performance savings you get from the CDN.
Might lab-grown diamonds have reached a point of being indistinguishable from natural diamonds such that people pass off lab-grown diamonds as natural diamonds without anyone being able to tell?
If you buy a certified diamond they will come with a laser engraving that indicates it was lab grown. They can tell if it was lab grown with special equipment and/or the chain of purchase. So, I guess you'd have to believe the certification company if they say it is NOT lab grown and that's what you want.
I have read that the distinguishing feature is that natural diamonds have flaws. Entrapped dirt or what have you that is not found in the sterile environment of the synthetic ones.
Maybe a specialist could tell a natural, formed over thousands of years, flaw from a lab-grown flaw, but really I think it's more like you can get a better grade from a lab (and especially with consistency, frequency, at a much lower price due to being rare to find naturally occurring). i.e. you can get flawed and coloured lab-grown diamonds too. (A mix of taking less care/time, older equipment, and binning the results like silicon wafers I assume.)
In my experience, the usefulness of live chat features varies wildly.
If the live chat service connects me to a human who is able to resolve my query in a timely manner, I'll take that any day.
Phoning a large company can result in waiting in a call queue for a long time. My attention is on the phone call instead of anything else. A live chat window can be relatively ignored and checked once in a while.
Emailing a large company can result in waiting for a reply taking 3-5 business years. Live chat gets me a response relatively quickly.
A live chat service that does not provide an easy means of interacting with a human and which instead easily allows getting stuck in a bot loop is a great example of poor customer service and, for me, a great way of quickly finding out who to not do business with.
That said, a poor live chat service for a business that I absolutely have to contact (most recently when terminating internet service after moving house) is an exercise in frustration and annoyance that is hard to replicate in any other manner.
> A live chat window can be relatively ignored and checked once in a while.
Some live chat implementations have taken the liberty of requiring an input from your end every X minutes, otherwise the chat terminates. Support agents have literally told me "please wait a while while I look into this" followed by "are we still connected?" just a few minutes later.
However, you can't expect a company to tie up a support person for 48 hours on their screen and you get back to them 2 days later, that is ridiculous.
Where is that line drawn that is not too short and not too long? I don't know, but there has to be a line.
I do think it is my responsibility to continually check my screen to see if there's been an answer to my last message. There are two sides and both must be responsible actors. I think 5 minutes is plenty of time, for example. As the saying goes, "You snooze, you lose."
And it has happened to me and everyone else, of course. BUT, and here is the cool thing - when I get back on the chat, I just say that I was chatting and got distracted...but then the tech support person can go review the notes and quickly get up to speed on the conversation.
Before signing up to a new service, I tend to contact their support first to assess how difficult it is to contact them.
If I have to wait for an hour to get support, or navigate through some maze to reach them, or find it difficult to attempt to terminate my contract, I'll go with someone else.
When I really need help or something is wrong, that's not when I want to find out that it is almost impossible to reach them.
Note to self: Use ChatGPT to immediately respond to any support request that aren't from existing users so that potential customers have to perform the Turing test.
Plot twist: the chat bot is also running the Turing test. If the potential customer passes, they can sign up. Otherwise, “Contact us for pricing” and I don’t mean it as an anti-bot feature…
> Emailing a large company can result in waiting for a reply taking 3-5 business years. Live chat gets me a response relatively quickly.
I've had the same experience, and I don't understand why. In both cases, someone needs to read what you write and reply to it with a message. Why can't the just treat email just like live chat?
I dislike live chat because it forces me to wait for their responses (I'm looking at you, Amazon, minutes to type 10 words?) and dedicate time to it instead of putting all the information into an email and sending it and communicating asynchronously.
Exactly. Good chat implementations are great; meaningful automated information, fast handover to human operators while also providing them with the relevant information, and all that in the comfort of my browser window is a great experience.
Being stuck in a loop against what's essentially a buggy ELIZA-Clone however, or a system that somehow is incapable of authenticating me even though I've logged into my account on their website, is not.
A lot of the people on HN might be very willing and able to search a FAQ to try and answer their own questions.
But you would not believe how many average people refuse to spend even 10 seconds trying to answer own question and insist on reaching out to a human even when the answer is very obviously readily available. Sometimes this makes sense; there's some scams out there and at least speaking to a native English-speaking person is reassuring when it comes to who you trust your money with. But sometimes some people are just miserable and want to annoy others.
From the other side of the fence - you can base your FAQs on actual questions (to the point of highlighting and bolding the most common) only to keep getting a significant amount of requests with that exact same question multiple times a day.
I can confirm that - at least in my experience - FAQ's are pre-made (and never or rarely updated), when a new service/site/whatever starts, it is logically nonsense that there is even one FAQ.
In theory everything should be clear from the info/documentation/manual, and when it is not so (as it often happens) and something is actually frequently asked, not only an entry in the FAQ list should be added (together with its FGA[0]) but the sheer fact that it is frequently asked should mean that the topic is not clear enough in the info/docs/etc and these should also actually be corrected/updated.
As a "disciplined" user (who actually did read both the FAQ's and the documentation) when you (manage to) contact (via mail/chat or phone) the assistance with a question/doubt there are usually three possibilities:
1) the assistant knows less than you on the topic and cannot answer properly
2) the assistant is competent and manages to answer your question, though with some difficulty (you made an original question)
3) the assistant is competent and answers your question easily because it has already been answered by him/her tens or hundreds of times (your question was not so original but never made it to the published FAQ's)
#3 is the clear sign of a failure in the way FAQ's are managed.
> Acronym for "frequently asked questions"; a list of answers to frequently asked questions that can be presented to a community (be it a forum, Usenet newsgroup, or software user base) so that the same questions need not be asked over and over again. In the entire history of their use, not one has ever been used for its intended purpose.
What the chat should have is something like a chat interface that exposes the FAQ via question and answering, through natural language processing, basically like ChatGPT but it doesn't need to be that advanced.
If the bot can't find the answer, connect to a human. That way, the company's support burden is decreased while still being able to talk to a human if needed.
This could be an email, but of course the business doesn't want this as it would create a record of interaction. Whenever I had to use live chat it was a tactic to wear you down.
I just now chatted with Amazon, and not only do they not send (or ask to send) a transcript, they even clear the chat once the agent has left so you can't even save it yourself.
I can't imagine any other reason but "we don't want the customer to be able to have a record".
I left a non 5 star review of an inexpensive Pixel 4 case. The case was too close around the flash resulting in the flash reflecting off the case resulting in absolutely awful pictures.
I was offered a refund and replacement of a newer version of the case in return for a better review.
The phone case was simply not fit for purpose as it was and the review fairly (I hope) highlighted this.
I accepted the replacement newer version and agreed to a more flattering review once the improved case was seen to indeed be improved. If the flaw had been fixed then it would be fair to reflect this in my review.
The improved case was no different and my review remained unchanged, except for an update reflecting the bribe.
