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whenc

Re:The UK paid £4.1M for a bookmarks site on Wednesday January 28, 2026 @08:09PM (#46804329)
I could have sworn your comment originally said "track and trace" not "test and trace". Perhaps not enough coffee.
Re:The UK paid £4.1M for a bookmarks site on Wednesday January 28, 2026 @07:18PM (#46803812)
Test, track, and trace.

https://fullfact.org/health/NHS-test-and-trace-app-37-billio...

"The NAO said that of the approximately £13.5 billion spent on the NHS Test and Trace programme in 2020/21, £35 million was spent on the app.

The vast majority of the spending in that year was accounted for by testing (£10.4 billion)."

Re:No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me on Monday December 08, 2025 @12:59PM (#46195478)
Out of an abundance of caution, I've deleted it. So there we are.
Re:No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me on Monday December 08, 2025 @12:49PM (#46195355)
...
Re:No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me on Monday December 08, 2025 @12:13PM (#46194863)
It went un-noticed here, I think, but The Pragmatic Bookshelf recently fired most of its staff and are taking on no new books. In the email they sent to authors, they quoted a 40% YoY fall in non-fiction sales, industry-wide.
Re:Ireland's Inability to Defend Itself on Saturday December 06, 2025 @04:22PM (#46176699)
And when they came back, they were blacklisted by order of the government:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16287211

Re:Spotlight on pdfly, the Swiss Army knife for PDF files on Monday October 13, 2025 @12:32PM (#45570306)
You can do:

  cpdf -output-json in.pdf -o out.json
(Modify out.json as liked)

  cpdf -j out.json -o out.pdf
(Disclaimer, I wrote it.)
PDF annotations sit within the file.
Re:Desktop Publishing Tools That Didn't Make It (2022) on Wednesday July 09, 2025 @07:12PM (#44515654)
The last big RISC OS program written in BASIC and assembler. I published something through Cerilica called TextFX, also in BASIC and assembler.

There was also Composition, by a chap from New Zealand. Multiple transparent layers of any size and position, and and interesting system-wide plugin system.

Re:PDF to Text, a Challenging Problem on Tuesday May 13, 2025 @12:01PM (#43974386)
Try with cpdf (disclaimer, wrote it):

  cpdf -output-json -output-json-parse-content-streams in.pdf -o out.json
Then you can play around with the JSON, and turn it back to PDF with

  cpdf -j out.json -o out.pdf
No live back-and-forth though.
Re:V.S. Naipaul: The Grief and the Glory on Monday May 05, 2025 @12:14PM (#43896629)
"....financial precarity (his income through the 1970s averaged £7,600 a year)"

£100000 in today's money in 1970. £35000 in today's money in 1979. Minimum wage today about £23000.

"Management is that for which there is no algorithm. If there's an algorithm, it's administration." (Maurice Wilkes, IIRC)
Re:How the U.K. Broke Its Own Economy on Tuesday March 04, 2025 @05:43AM (#43252932)
I suspect they are confusing "total market capitalization of companies on stock exchange" with "financial industry".
Re:2k-year-old wine and the uncanny immediacy of the past on Thursday January 16, 2025 @10:16PM (#42733725)
We come mentally of age when we discover that the great minds of the past, whom we have patronized, are not less intelligent than we are because they happen to be dead -- Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave
Re:Is Iceland getting ready to join the EU? on Sunday December 29, 2024 @06:28PM (#42544563)
No, they don't. Whilst Switzerland is not in the EEA, it does have agreements with the EU which include FoM.
Re:Is Iceland getting ready to join the EU? on Sunday December 29, 2024 @06:04PM (#42544350)
Iceland already has freedom of movement (to live and work) due to its EEA membership; and it is only somewhat to do with Schengen, which is about passport free travel not living and working. You can have FoM without Schengen - e.g Romania until 1st Jan 2025.
Re:Is Iceland getting ready to join the EU? on Sunday December 29, 2024 @11:45AM (#42541023)
Iceland is not in the CFP.
Pedantry: Cyprus is in the levant, and the UK has two sovereign areas there.
Re:OpenID Connect specifications published as ISO standards on Sunday November 10, 2024 @03:50PM (#42102551)
This has now been remedied:

https://pdfa.org/sponsored-standards/

Re:Milk Watcher on Sunday May 26, 2024 @06:18PM (#40485918)
I know it as a "toffee hammer".
"We come mentally of age when we discover that the great minds of the past, whom we have patronized, are not less intelligent than we are because they happen to be dead."

-- Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave

Re:Tesla strike widens as Swedish union expands blockade on Saturday November 04, 2023 @08:37PM (#38146771)
Sweden being a member of the customs union, the cars can be brought in via any other custom union state i.e the EEA plus Turkey.

FastSpring phish

Edit: it was, indeed, a much cleverer than usual Phish. The link content was unusually convincing.

( Read More... | 2 comments | 2 points | on HN )
The days of 99p tickets on Megabus are gone, but booking ahead it's still just £6.88 from London to Manchester on Megabus. Mind you, Ryanair will fly you from London to Venice for £9.99.
Miles is good fun. Also Manhattan to Montauk on local buses:

https://youtu.be/fKQmp0spxhs

Re:Show HN: Privacy friendly suite of PDF tools on Thursday February 09, 2023 @11:14AM (#34726227)
You might find this interesting to add functionality to this website: it's a JavaScript version our commercial PDF tools, and can run entirely in the browser. It's AGPL, so you wouldn't need a commercial license for your use case, so long as you release your source, as you say you plan to in another comment:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/coherentpdf

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