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Hidden motors in cycling: Van den Dreissche banned for 6 years, titles stripped

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91–100 of 205 posts

Re: Hidden motors in cycling: Van den Dreissche banned for 6 years, titles stripped

#91
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It must be tough writing code in Europe - computers only use decimal points, not decimal commas. And how do you make an international interface for money, when you never know how people will enter things? I'm kind of confused as to why you're confused, so bear with me if I oversimplify, but are you aware of the globalization settings in your OS? It determines the display and entry format of things like currency. Yes,…

I don't know about you, but for me it's pretty common to output numbers that I then use in the program. So you have to distinguish between output meant for a program and output meant for human. Say someone gives you a logfile of problematic transactions - you then have to convert all the numbers to decimal points before using them in some one-off program that checks them.

So you have to distinguish between output meant for a program and output meant for human.

That pretty much defines my career, yes.

Say someone gives you a logfile of problematic transactions - you then have to convert all the numbers to decimal points before using them in some one-off program that checks them.

Say someone gives me a MongoDB full of transactions that need to be transformed into relational data for our data warehouse...hey, I'll bet I could make a career out of this.

I truly don't mean to be trite, but what you describe is just the way of things. In your log file example, a regex would more than likely solve the problem. One loop, a readln() and a writeln(), sorted. People do it everyday. Hell, I'll probably do something similar before the day is out.

Re: Hidden motors in cycling: Van den Dreissche banned for 6 years, titles stripped

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but casual cyclists will not pay €2499 for the pleasure of doing so

It depends how you define "casual". I tend to think of casual cyclists as avid cyclists who don't race. Anybody who isn't avid is just a guy/gal on a bike. By that definition, casual cyclists spend ridiculous amounts of money on cycling kit. $2000 for a set of carbon fiber wheels. $1000 for a power meter. Trek has a custom line of bikes (Project One) that retail in the $7000-$15000 range (US).

By my thoughts, somebody who's spent more than $1000 or so on bike and gear, maximum, isn't a "casual" cyclist.

If they're buying individual parts that cost more than an entire road bike that would be recommended by a store clerk to some guy walking in off the street, they're well beyond "casual".

Re: Hidden motors in cycling: Van den Dreissche banned for 6 years, titles stripped

#94
post #88

>She also said that this bike was taken by accident by her helpers to the pit area. >She claimed that he had put a motor in unbeknownst to her What is with athletes and never admitting their mistakes. You were caught, I would have much more respect for someone if they just came out and said "Yes, I did it, I take full responsibility." Instead they come up with these ridiculous excuses that do nothing but continue to…

Marion Jones is the only person I can think of that has actually done this.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/10/05/jones.doping/index.html?ere...

Re: Hidden motors in cycling: Van den Dreissche banned for 6 years, titles stripped

#95
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Writing code is not that tough in Europe - just use a proper i18n library. Not even having to think about that initially is sure handy for US startups. You can get pretty big without worrying too much about other languages and all the confusion that entails.

True - until you go north and need a french translation ;)

English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and to a lesser extent Dutch will get you pretty much the entire western hemisphere. They all use the same alphabet, all read left-to-right, and are all SVO word order--except for Dutch, which is SOV/V2.

Also, a US company will need a Spanish translation before it even considers French.

Anyway, the point is that it is a lot easier to half-ass internationalization and localization for both of the Americas and the Caribbean than it is in Europe and Asia. That is just indisputably true. European coders must get that correct starting from version 1.0, whereas Americans can blithely ignore it for years.

Re: Hidden motors in cycling: Van den Dreissche banned for 6 years, titles stripped

#96
post #2

This is a follow-up to discussions on "mechanical doping" in cycling. The first story I recall on this topic was in 2010: http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2010/may/19/cycling-motors-... This is now 6 years later, and we finally have the first pro cyclist banned based on being caught red-handed at an event with a motor in her bicycle. The type of motor she used was a Vivak, one of these: http://www.vivax-assist.com/en…

Bike motors were discussed fairly in-depth on HN 2 months ago; it seems to be this website's ticket to the front page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11247598

Re: Hidden motors in cycling: Van den Dreissche banned for 6 years, titles stripped

#97
Why do they care about such a niche/illegal market, this idea is fantastic, imagine Boris bikes in London for example - they could recharge batteries when docked, it would be awesome to have this kind of engine in those tank-bikes.

Extra points - please distribute heat on the handles because it's often cold. Thank you.

Re: Hidden motors in cycling: Van den Dreissche banned for 6 years, titles stripped

#98
post #88

>She also said that this bike was taken by accident by her helpers to the pit area. >She claimed that he had put a motor in unbeknownst to her What is with athletes and never admitting their mistakes. You were caught, I would have much more respect for someone if they just came out and said "Yes, I did it, I take full responsibility." Instead they come up with these ridiculous excuses that do nothing but continue to…

This is a lying, cheating, athlete in particular, so it's not surprising. Many athletes do have integrity and don't need to concoct such excuses.

Re: Hidden motors in cycling: Van den Dreissche banned for 6 years, titles stripped

#99
post #88

>She also said that this bike was taken by accident by her helpers to the pit area. >She claimed that he had put a motor in unbeknownst to her What is with athletes and never admitting their mistakes. You were caught, I would have much more respect for someone if they just came out and said "Yes, I did it, I take full responsibility." Instead they come up with these ridiculous excuses that do nothing but continue to…

Marion Jones is the only person I can think of that has actually done this. http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/10/05/jones.doping/index.html?ere...

Yes, but only after initially denying it all

Re: Hidden motors in cycling: Van den Dreissche banned for 6 years, titles stripped

#100
post #64
post #17

This is unrelated, but that has to be the most confusing way to write a price I've ever seen: 2.699,00 - a period for the thousands separator, and a decimal comma for the cents. I am aware of decimal commas - but a period for the thousands? I thought they used a space, or an apostrophe? 2'699,00 It must be tough writing code in Europe - computers only use decimal points, not decimal commas. And how do you make an int…

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11581036 and marked it off-topic.

Out of curiosity, what does marking a subthread off topic entail?
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