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turkeywelder

Repair costs are very high (and take ages) and most of them are expensive cars outright which puts the premiums up.

Performance being pretty high on even a basic Tesla doesn't help things either. The insurance market in the UK is very expensive anyway and any excuse to wind up premiums they'll gladly use.

Show HN: Tracking iCal feed latency across O365/Google/Apple

https://sync.timetastic.co.uk/

We track a lot of iCal feeds at Timetastic[0] and I thought it'd be interesting to see if we could identify when Google or Outlook's iCal feed fetchers were down or slow because the latency can vary wildly from a few hours to days.We already log the timestamps and user agents for the feed checkins and we've got a rolling month's worth of data so this seemed like a nice little exercise I could...

( Read More... | no comments | 3 points | on HN )
Re:UK total wind generation record beaten today on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @03:36PM (#47522114)
Love your stuff Robin. The graphs and wind turbine model are particular favourites

How can we fix the curtailment problem? Storage nearer the turbines or just more transmission capacity generally? I presume we'd saturate storage pretty quickly so is it just a case of running more grid wiring from Scotland to say.. Manchester?

Re:Dark Patterns: Buying a Bahncard at Deutsche Bahn on Friday October 10, 2025 @02:05AM (#45535763)
Idiotic Brit here.

Not exactly how we think. We're frustrated that our private railway is worse than DB in terms of lateness and cancellations but also hugely, massively more expensive for us to use.

We'd be happy if it was publicly owned because then at least the insane profit from ticket sales might possibly just maybe make it into investment in the railway instead of someone's bonus.

Re:Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2025) on Monday March 03, 2025 @01:29PM (#43245041)
Location: Manchester, UK

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: c# .NET, React, Javascript, Typescript, SQL (Full stack .net dev)

Résumé/CV: Available on request

Email: garethterrace at gmail

It's time for a new challenge. I've been working on https://timetastic.co.uk full time since 2017 and have worn many hats from setting up an API, to setting up blogs and websites, to building features, to design, debugging, vuln scanning, DNS, Email setup and everything in between.

I've been in software for 16+ years and have worked in SaaS, B2B, internal tools and all sorts. I thrive in small, productive teams where I can get deeply involved and get things done.

No recruiters, no gambling/betting.

Re:Stop Trying to Schedule a Call with Me on Sunday January 12, 2025 @09:46AM (#42673890)
This is why we have a flat "we won't fill in your forms" rule and only take card payments. We've lost some clients because of it sure, but we're a small team so it's fine.

I think being up front about what you will and won't do really helps. They still ask for procurement forms and stuff but we can at least deny it and set an expectation.

https://help.timetastic.co.uk/hc/en-us/articles/115003288769...

Re:Azure Down? on Tuesday July 30, 2024 @09:45AM (#41109146)
Our parent company are having issues in UKSouth but we're spread across UKSouth and UKWest and not seeing any issues. Apparently Functionapps also having issues, but we're seeing nothing at the moment.
Re:Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2024) on Monday July 01, 2024 @05:57PM (#40851219)
Location: Manchester, UK

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: C#, .NET, React, JS, some Typescript, MSSQL, Gatsby

Résumé/CV: on request - I don't have linkedin since the breach

Email: garethterrace at gmail

I'm a full stack dev, I work best in C#/.NET with React and really like smaller companies. Starting to look for my next opportunity after 10 years working on Timetastic. Only decided to start looking today, so still writing up the CV!

Cheers

Raise it with the ombudsman!
Might not be very obscure but it was new to me. Ended up being really useful for finding out whether dates intersect a particular period and ended up using it quite a bit at work.

Range Tree:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_tree

You give it a range of dates and it'll tell you if any intersect so if you're looking for "how many people are absent in this time period" you can really quickly find out by using a range tree.

We send a "weekly summary" email of who is absent in your company in the next week.

At 9am on a Monday we send roughly 100k emails via Sendgrid and have very very low spam report rates. Transactional email for even relatively small SaaS companies can get high very quickly.

As much as us in the dev world rely on Slack and try to avoid notification overload, my experience is most people want things as an email.

Ask HN: Azure users, are slot swaps broken lately?

We've been having consistent issues with swapping slots on Azure App service lately and support can't help us pinpoint the issue. Wondering if it's a general issue throughout the platform or if it's just us.If anyone's come across this before where slot swaps timeout or just fail and then if you retry a few times they'll sometimes work I'd be keen to hear what got it working again!

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Re:The 0.5 MB of nothing in all Apple Music files (2020) on Thursday April 07, 2022 @12:18PM (#30946548)
That's how most of Europe do decimal places, using commas instead of full stops.
Re:Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers? on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @12:45PM (#30768377)
I miss Grooveshark so much - Licensing issues aside it was one of the best UIs for music ever. I'd love to hear more stories about the backend
Re:Ask HN: How do you manage your companies knowledge base? on Thursday February 17, 2022 @07:22AM (#30372301)
All the business knowledge is in Basecamp as that's where all the "work planning" is done. If you want to find out how a specific feature works, or how the decisions were made for that, go find the project in Basecamp, it'll be archived if it's shipped but it's still searchable.

For new dev setup/infrastructure stuff we use a github Wiki and the new starters point out issues in that for us - their first tasks are to update it if they find issues or missing info because it forces them to go and dig around to find the knowledge islands - they're the best people for it because it's who we want to solve the problem for.

Admittedly we've got a small company and a nice tight tech stack but there's still tribal knowledge in 2-3 people's heads and distilling that out to the team is a slow process of pair programming and explanation.

Re:Issue with Cloudflare currently returning blank pages on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @06:23PM (#28532302)
They've been having lots of issues lately. Broke our entire login flow by setting multiple set cookie headers.

https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/30ptcb3b0s2w

Support taking days to get back to us.

Not sure what's happening but it's leaving a bad taste

Hello from a fellow UK HR (ish) company. This looks like a strong start - payroll is hard!

Good luck, we all need to band together to get rid of these insane portals of horrible UX

Re:Duolingo S-1 IPO on Tuesday June 29, 2021 @03:59AM (#27673119)
> •users feel that their experience is diminished as a result of the decisions we make with respect to the frequency, prominence, format, size and quality of ads that we display;

They should show short video ads in the language you're learning, so the challenge is to understand the ad. Free learning, better engagement and actually relevant ads.

I'd be up for that I think

If anyone's in the sauce shipping game, try and get the Huy Fong one distributed in the UK. The market here is dominated by "flying goose" sriracha which is good, but not the same as the Huy Fong and there's a fair market for it here I think.
Re:How Intuitive Are Macs Really? on Monday May 24, 2021 @02:04PM (#27267667)
ohh that option thing is well hidden, thanks for that. Is there a keyboard shortcut for it?
Re:How Intuitive Are Macs Really? on Monday May 24, 2021 @11:47AM (#27265756)
> Like the first time after a boot/login?

More often than that - I knew it'd ask on fresh boot, but this is after switching users or just a night where it pretends to sleep. I'm still tracking it down and figuring out the scenarios. I'm not averse to it as an OS, I just want to understand why it's done something when it has.

Re:How Intuitive Are Macs Really? on Monday May 24, 2021 @11:40AM (#27265641)
In our use it was perfectly fine, it'll run fine with 4gb of ram and a Celeron. I wouldn't want to do hardcore software dev on one because they're usually low end screens and CPUs, but as a "here's a safe machine you can't break" they're absolutely brilliant for family.

Boot time is instant, OS updates are instant, battery life is great, if there was ever "linux for the desktop" it's ChromeOS.

It's not all roses though: full disclosure: our Chromebook is stuck on Chrome 68 so these might not apply any more.

- The file management is poor, a zip file can and will confuse it

- Bluetooth is Windows XP levels of stable, if you get a device it likes you're good, but it can be finicky.

- The device has a fixed expiry date where they stop getting software updates, this is the big kicker for me, because we had a perfectly functional machine that was a bit old that just got turned into E waste because nobody wanted to support the software any more. Shame because it was a fantastic machine. I'm hoping our Mac lasts longer than the Chromebook it's replacing

Re:How Intuitive Are Macs Really? on Monday May 24, 2021 @11:33AM (#27265554)
Recent M1 user here - I had a PowerPC mac back in the Leopard/Tiger days. I thought OSx would have come on leaps and bounds since then.

It's....more or less unchanged. As well as this crazy installer thing, there's quite a bit about Macs that just seems off.. My list of "things that don't seem right" as a long term Windows/ChromeOS user

- Window snapping isn't built in outside of fullscreen mode (seriously?!)

- Sleeping the mac does not sleep the mac, it wakes up at all sorts of times

- Every time the OS updates, I have to go through a setup process again, trying to upsell me on iCloud drive. Nothing updates as nicely as ChromeOS but I'd hope for at least a reboot and back to where I left off

- TouchID for login works....but not often enough - it constantly pesters me for a password

- Pressing enter renames a file rather than opens it. What?

- The Finder is either named ironically or I'm not getting it - file paths are obscured, seeing file details is hidden behind a dialog.

We bought the M1 because ChromeOS didn't like our old Samsung printer and the VPN software my partner uses and Google had killed the update life for it for...reasons. In an expensive lesson of "whoops", the Mac doesn't like the printer either.

A lot of this is me getting back into it and getting used to things, but I sort of miss ChromeOS.

In Apple's defence, the hardware is amazing and the bluetooth is fantastic. Could have put a port on either side to make charging nicer though.

I'm starting to lose faith in cloudflare lately - we're on the business plan and there's been some really strange UI bugs in the dashboard where it looks like state just isn't reflected properly (Access and Load Balancing being ones we see quite a bit)

Summary of things that we've had issues with lately:

- Caching of a specific route just stopped working. I log a support ticket (nightmare to find in the dashboard) and miraculously it starts working again after the ticket gets responsded to.

- Some of our staff got locked out of part of our app because we exceeded the 5 free users of the "Access" plan. Upgraded to the 50 user plan in the new Teams part and it still didn't work. Contacted support, fixed again but no explanation. (multiple day turnaround on tickets)

We're invested in their tech a lot and I love workers - they really take some big tasks off us. If Azure come up with something compelling we'll probably switch though (assuming I can make sense of Azure's billing and product naming strategy)

that'll never happen - WhatsApp is almost WeChat for Europe, it's ubiquitous and the network effect is so strong you'll really struggle to get masses of people to switch away fom it.

99% of people outside of the HN bubble will just look at the dialog, click OK and carry on as normal.

Re:Pricing Low-Touch SaaS on Monday September 21, 2020 @11:13AM (#24544372)
We did the same, it's I think one of our best moves because everyone just gets the same price, nobody feels like they're missing out and it's super easy to administrate so we can concentrate on the product, not the pricing.
Re:A Guide to Pricing Plans on Sunday April 19, 2020 @01:02AM (#22913649)
Nothing at all wrong with it. It's just something we haven't done yet. Priorities, features and bugs all battle for our limited resources.
Re:A Guide to Pricing Plans on Saturday April 18, 2020 @06:14PM (#22911567)
As a consumer I'm really not a fan of these techniques. I'm biased but our SaaS just has one price, no annual discount, no messing. It seems to be working out. I think people appreciate the straightforward approach when everything these days seems to have a pricing table.

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