- University is definitely not free, at least in England. Fees are £9k per year. Interest rates are high and you don’t have to pay it back unless you earn over a certain amount so in reality, it’s more like a graduate tax for many, but it’s definitely not free.
- Childcare is limited to a few free days a week, often has extras to be paid for and is otherwise very expensive. For those on higher incomes that’s reduced too.
- 52 weeks parental leave is for the mother only and is only at statutory pay after 6 weeks (about £150 per week). Paternity leave is 2 weeks at statutory pay.
- 6 weeks of holiday is not normal. Normal would be about 4 weeks.
- The state pension is £185 per week. Nearly everybody contributes a decent amount to a private pension too.
> 52 weeks parental leave is for the mother only and is only at statutory pay after 6 weeks (about £150 per week). Paternity leave is 2 weeks at statutory pay.
It used to be that mothers were entitled to maternity leave which broke down as:
- 6 weeks at 90% of your average pay
- 33 weeks of statutory maternity pay (£156/wk)
- 13 weeks unpaid
The legal minimum is 20 days plus 8 public holidays. I don't know anyone in a white collar job who gets fewer than 25 (+8) days off, and in the public sector 30 seems to be the low end.
A well-designed home automation system will still work with manual controls and/or if the system is offline.
I have smart devices everywhere yet I can still adjust the thermostat manually, turn on lights using a normal switch, set the house alarm using the keypad etc. However, I also have a 'Night' scene in Home Assistant which sets my alarm to night mode, turns off all the lights in the house and sets the thermostat to night temperature all with a single tap and all over the local network.
^ this. You need to have a high WAF - wife acceptance factor. Another analogy is that grandma needs to be able to stay in the house and not need a computer science degree.
Your home automation system is a complimentary enhancement to a traditional, switch-on-the-wall and physical TV remote control set up.
I've been using Apple Maps in the UK for the past year after buying a car with CarPlay. I also used it in hire cars in a couple of other European countries. It's pretty good.
Traffic is accurate, although it is be a little slower to update than Google Maps (it seems to be ~5 mins behind). Directions are spot on and the UI (at least in CarPlay) is clear and detailed. The only thing that's poor compared to Google Maps is the search but it's certainly a decent alternative and it's come a long way since it was first released.
The only thing I dislike about Apple Maps is its screwed up hierarchy of importance. Local trains stations, leisure centres, schools etc seem to be afforded the same level of importance as the local nail bar. It's horribly cluttered.
I think the author was suggesting that many web apps are moving towards having a large frontend built in React/Vue. Therefore they don't need such a heavy framework as Rails on the backend and they can use something more lightweight to power their API.
I've recently moved home and these are the steps I had to take to change my address with my current bank and Monzo.
My bank: I look on their website which says I can phone up and do it over the phone. I phone up, go through the automated options and then I'm told that actually I have to go into a branch with ID and proof of address because apparently I'm not registered for 'telephone banking' (why?!).
The nearest branch to me is open 9-4.30pm on weekdays and 9-1pm on Saturdays. I generally work at these times so I have to take time out of work to go into a branch, queue for 10 minutes and eventually get it changed.
Monzo: I open a live chat within their app, answer a couple of security questions and the address is changed right away. It took about 5 minutes at most and I could do it while working on other things.
My bank also charge a small fortune for foreign transactions and contactless won't work abroad. Monzo is free and contactless has so far worked fine in 3 different countries.
The UK banking industry is massively behind the times with regards to customer service, facilities and technology. The potential for Monzo is huge if they can pull off what they're trying to achieve.
The banking industry is very conservative because of regulation. Changing identity over live chat just by answering some security questions seems to be quite vulnerable to fraud.
I can also imagine that changing the customers' address without proof of address could violate KYC/AML rules.
So while I agree that banking in the UK can be a pain (although less than in other countries), I think it's mostly due to legal requirements, not bad intention.
With interest rates that low, retail banking is all about cost cutting. They could save a lot more money if you'd never have to visit a branch, but verifying an identity via chat is not easy.
I'm not so sure. My bank would accept an address change over the phone for 'telephone banking' customers, which is no more secure than an in-app chat. Even if they required me to upload proof via the in-app chat, that would still be 100x easier than the process I had to go through with my bank.
Obviously banks have a lot of regulation they have to comply with but I think a lot of it is simply a case of "that's how it's always been" and a lack of competition due to the high barriers to entry.
Yep, exactly. We're currently running the exact same code on both AWS Lambda and IronWorker, all that differs is a simple handler file.
We're looking to add support for Microsoft's new Azure Functions and Google Cloud Functions, and this will be a matter of creating a single file for each to handle the input.
You should always abstract your dependencies, especially if it's a critical part of your infrastructure.
I traveled through Baku airport in Azerbaijan last summer which had body and luggage scanners at the entrance to the terminal. I wonder how long before this becomes the norm?
This really won't help the issue. You still create choke points where many people are waiting to pass through the security check.
People interested in killing others will just go for the easiest place, so they will just bomb the line at the scanners entering the terminal.
I talk to a lot of frequent fliers, and almost every one of them has said that there is no point to a terrorist trying to bomb a plane any more. The easiest target for terrorism is simply the insecure portion of an airport. We saw this today in Brussels.
We're doing the same. I re-wrote our code over the weekend from sending solely through Mandrill, to splitting our traffic 50/50 between SendGrid and SparkPost. I'm going to implement a similar strategy for some other external services we rely on and I've open sourced the Go code [1].
This also has the benefit that if one service goes down, we can automatically fallback to the other with (hopefully) no downtime. Most email providers have a limit to what you can send until you're established with them, so using another provider as a standard backup isn't feasible, as suddenly sending 1,000's of emails a day will see the account get suspended pretty quickly.
Plus, if one of them goes out of business or changes their terms with little notice, like Mandrill, we should have a bit more time to work around it as at least one service will work.
Browsers are adding support now: https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/. Upcoming Chrome releases will have 90%+ compatibility if you only care about bleeding edge browsers.
Yes, and as a corollary to my comment above I do have my own apps that I write that are entirely in ES2015 (aka ES6) and haven't found any features that I really want to use that aren't implemented by the big browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge). No transpiling needed; it seems like transpiling is only really needed if you want to support legacy versions of Internet Explorer.
Only Internet Explorer lags behind, but I'm not opposed to putting a warning when somebody visits with Internet Explorer when its my own little app.
Actually, I firmly believe that this applies to big apps as well. From my experience, if there is an app a user needs and it requires the user to upgrade their browser? They will upgrade their browser. Most don't upgrade because nobody asks them to. If a need arises in a corp environment to use an app with the simple requirement of a modern browser - they will upgrade it. If the apps always "allow" sub par browser support and bend over backwards for it - there will never be a reason for people to upgrade.
They want to use this tech to eventually land rockets on other planets so the rocket needs to be able to land upright. Short term it might be easier to land on inflatables but they're looking at the bigger picture.
The utility here is not really landing on other planets, but instead the order of magnitude decrease in launch costs if they don't have to build a new first stage for every launch.
This could theoretically be achieved by either means. The question was specifically why a vertical landing is favoured over a cushioned inflatable landing.
Musk has stated in the past that they're looking to eventually use this tech to create rockets which can be used on Mars, hence why parachutes and inflatables are out of the question.
No, its just not possible to maintain the integrity of the rocket if you're going to somehow lay it down on an inflatable. How could an inflatable withstand the temperature of the firing engines?
- University is definitely not free, at least in England. Fees are £9k per year. Interest rates are high and you don’t have to pay it back unless you earn over a certain amount so in reality, it’s more like a graduate tax for many, but it’s definitely not free.
- Childcare is limited to a few free days a week, often has extras to be paid for and is otherwise very expensive. For those on higher incomes that’s reduced too.
- 52 weeks parental leave is for the mother only and is only at statutory pay after 6 weeks (about £150 per week). Paternity leave is 2 weeks at statutory pay.
- 6 weeks of holiday is not normal. Normal would be about 4 weeks.
- The state pension is £185 per week. Nearly everybody contributes a decent amount to a private pension too.