Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

"Nothing like this will be built again"

antipope.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 97 posts

Re: "Nothing like this will be built again"

#11

Post by sbierwagen »

neur0 wrote: post #9
sbierwagen wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can resubmit a link after a year, I think? In any event, there's no way to block resubmissions programatically: the site owner could just change the name of the file.

The page content's hash or any other blueprint (an arbitrary regex match) could be checked against for resubmissions. For convenience, if resubmission should be detected, the original post could be topped on the frontpage nevertheless, because old material may as well be worth revisiting for several reasons -- I for one had missed this article before, and enjoyed it reading greatly now.

  page content hash
Change one byte.

  regex match
Now we get into ship-of-theseus arguments. What counts as the "same" article? 99 percent? 51 percent?

What if you resubmit a blog post that's picked up 150 more comments since it was last posted? How would HN tell the comments apart from the article text?

What if someone submits a blog post that heavily quotes another article that's been submitted, in the process of rebutting it, and ends up being a 80% match?

What if you include the full text of moby dick, in a display:none ? What if the page loads the text of the article with javascript? Would the HN submissionbot have to render CSS and javascript?

Re: "Nothing like this will be built again"

#12

Post by objclxt »

gaius wrote: post #8

Nothing like it will be built again because a) successive British governments over the last 30 years have buried their heads in the sand over energy policy[1] and b) we as a country don't do actual engineering anymore. Both a and b mean that our energy future likes wholly in the hands of France! [1] Say what you like about Thatcher, at least she had a halfway coherent energy story.

>we as a country don't do actual engineering anymore

...is that really true? The UK is currently home to Europe's largest civil engineering project (Crossrail), my hometown produces Trent jet engines and designs wings for all Airbus aircraft. And there's the cars that are both manufactured (BMW, Honda, Toyota, Nissan, etc) and designed (Jaguar, Aston Martin, Land Rover, McLaren...) here.

The engineering we do has changed, and maybe there is less of it than there was forty years ago, but it's a bit hyperbolic to say we simply "don't do" actual engineering.

Re: "Nothing like this will be built again"

#13

Post by rosser »

RyanZAG wrote: post #4

Looks like whoever posted this got around the repost limit by appending a '?' to the end of the url. Someone should fix that.

I disagree. I — and others — have used query parameters to submit links to Humble Bundles, for example. New Bundles are launched regularly, and the broader HN community tends to have useful things to say about the titles in any given Bundle, and to appreciate the heads-up to their existence.

Re: "Nothing like this will be built again"

#14

Post by moomin »

objclxt wrote: post #12
gaius wrote: post #8

Nothing like it will be built again because a) successive British governments over the last 30 years have buried their heads in the sand over energy policy[1] and b) we as a country don't do actual engineering anymore. Both a and b mean that our energy future likes wholly in the hands of France! [1] Say what you like about Thatcher, at least she had a halfway coherent energy story.

> we as a country don't do actual engineering anymore ...is that really true? The UK is currently home to Europe's largest civil engineering project (Crossrail), my hometown produces Trent jet engines and designs wings for all Airbus aircraft. And there's the cars that are both manufactured (BMW, Honda, Toyota, Nissan, etc) and designed (Jaguar, Aston Martin, Land Rover, McLaren...) here. The engineering we do has ch…

I seem to recall that, measured by value in real terms, the UK does more engineering than ever. Just because it's a smaller part of the economy and doesn't support as many unskilled people doesn't mean it's not happening.

On an unrelated note, some of the social issues we complain about these days seem to be a direct consequence of the off-shoring of manual labour.

Re: "Nothing like this will be built again"

#15

Post by vacri »

jdale27 wrote: post #7
RyanZAG wrote: post #4

Looks like whoever posted this got around the repost limit by appending a '?' to the end of the url. Someone should fix that.

Looks like whoever posted this got around the repost limit by appending a '?' to the end of the url. Someone should fix that. Yeah, because we should never, ever be subjected to the same content twice. After all, this is Hacker News , not Hacker Olds , amirite? (Sorry for the snark. I have been reading Hacker News for several years, and I don't recollect having read this article before. I enjoyed it, I upvoted it, an…

I have vague recollection of reading it on HN before, but meh, it's not like we're wading through a swamp of reposts. My scrollwheel still works.

Re: "Nothing like this will be built again"

#16

Post by arethuza »

Worth noting that the visitor centre for Torness recently re-opened, it looks like you need to make an appointment in advance (for security checks) but, having had a detailed tour of another AGR plant years ago, I suspect it may be worth visiting:

http://www.edfenergy.com/about-us/energy-generation/nuclear-...

Also, if you do visit Torness and you have an interest in science (which seems likely) then you might want to visit the nearby Hutton's Unconformity at Siccar Point - this is one of the places where 18th century geologist James Hutton first found evidence of the tremendous age of the Earth, as his travelling companion John Playfair put it:

"The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far back into the abyss of time"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutton%27s_Unconformity

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siccar_Point

Re: "Nothing like this will be built again"

#18

Post by raverbashing »

jdale27 wrote: post #7
RyanZAG wrote: post #4

Looks like whoever posted this got around the repost limit by appending a '?' to the end of the url. Someone should fix that.

Looks like whoever posted this got around the repost limit by appending a '?' to the end of the url. Someone should fix that. Yeah, because we should never, ever be subjected to the same content twice. After all, this is Hacker News , not Hacker Olds , amirite? (Sorry for the snark. I have been reading Hacker News for several years, and I don't recollect having read this article before. I enjoyed it, I upvoted it, an…

And sometimes the page changes but the url stays the same

Re: "Nothing like this will be built again"

#19

Post by arethuza »

gaius wrote: post #8

Nothing like it will be built again because a) successive British governments over the last 30 years have buried their heads in the sand over energy policy[1] and b) we as a country don't do actual engineering anymore. Both a and b mean that our energy future likes wholly in the hands of France! [1] Say what you like about Thatcher, at least she had a halfway coherent energy story.

"we as a country don't do actual engineering anymore"

Let's see - within a few miles of Edinburgh we have being built:

- 65000 ton aircraft carriers

- A new 2700m road bridge over the Firth of Forth

- Eurofighter work

- A new railway being open to the Borders (OK - reopening an old line)

OK, I won't mention our trams, but there certainly seems to be a hell of a lot of "engineering" going on in the immediate vicinity.

Maybe Edinburgh is unusual in having such a burst of engineering activity in our vicinity?

NB Even the crane built to build the aircraft carriers is an impressive bit of engineering:

http://www.aircraftcarrieralliance.co.uk/en/media/image-libr...

I rather like the fact that the huge crane has another crane on top of it - which looks tiny but is probably quite large!

Re: "Nothing like this will be built again"

#20

Post by simonbarker87 »

gaius wrote: post #8

Nothing like it will be built again because a) successive British governments over the last 30 years have buried their heads in the sand over energy policy[1] and b) we as a country don't do actual engineering anymore. Both a and b mean that our energy future likes wholly in the hands of France! [1] Say what you like about Thatcher, at least she had a halfway coherent energy story.

"we as a country don't do actual engineering"

What do you mean by "actual engineering"?

- the UK makes and develops satellites - designs, develops and produces a huge number of jet engines - is home to nearly all the Formula 1 teams - the Nissan car plant in Sunderland produced 500,000 cars last year which is a huge engineering challenge and is now the home to the main production of the LEAF electric car - Teeside is still the home of chemical processing - companies like Alert Me are leading the charge in smart energy consumption - last time I checked Arm were stil based in Sheffield and Cambridge and scaring the pants off Intel - last, but not least, BAE systems is in the midst of producing some of the best and most advance submarines in the world and commissioning nuclear reactors in the process.

I do however agree with your first point - although there are a lot of wind farms around now which is nice to see

Post reply on HN