I’m interested, please link!

Hah nope! Even as a Belgian I find the naming of the Brussels train stations maddening. Brussels-Midi is the south station, so Brussel-Zuid. Midi allegedly means south in French, but I've never actually heard it being used over "sud", also south.

In conversation, midi also means noon (e.g. used as "meet me at noon"), which for my brain correlates more with central than south, given the context of a day.

Not a linguist, so what do I know, maybe someone else can chime in.

This is indeed the bizarre convo I was having with myself, having (allegedly) taken some French classes, I was racking my brain on which was the correct answer. We always used "sud", and Midi didn't seem to be south, eliminating Zuid (Since Zuid/Sud seemed similar), and yes Midi seems "mid-day", so maybe "Central" since it's the center of the day, but then there's "Centraal", so why would there be Centraal and "Brussels Middle"?!

So we winged it and got off at Zuid (since Noord felt wrong and Centraal definitely seemed wrong) and luckily it was the right one.

We did have a wonderful evening (perhaps too much so) the night before at a nice craft beer bar in Leuven which had 100 beers on tap, and it had just bought over by a nice young couple as well. So perhaps neither of us were in the right state that morning to navigate a confusing train map! Good memories.

Southern France is also called le Midi!

BTW, Ukrainian shares the same logic, but it also calls the north "midnight" (північ). Meanwhile, Armenian calls the east and west "sun exit" and "sun entrance" (արևելք, արևմուտք) respectively.

In Europe (and anywhere else north of the Tropic of Cancer), the sun is always approximately due south at noon. That’s the reason for the connection, and “midi” indeed means both south (in some contexts) and noon in French.

Makes a lot of sense, thanks for the insight!

Quite curious, which route was this on?

Not one time have I had a consistent internet connection whilst flying transatlantic on Delta, KLM or BA airplanes, to the point that I regretted having paid for it every single time.

I haven’t been to India for 7 years but I distinctly remember a very productive flight from Delhi to Heathrow on wifi while I was sshed into a machine and working on something for hours with no issue - far better than the signal I get on the train from London to Manchester.

Qatar/Virgin Australia, Sydney->Doha. I’ve never had really good connection either before this, and I tried many-many times. That was the exception when it worked as intended.

We self host Grafana Tempo and whilst the cost isn’t negligible (at 50k spans per second), the money saved in developer time when debugging an error, compared to having to sift through and connect logs, is easily an order of magnitude higher.

> Someone studying abroad usually isn’t allowed to work

Citation needed, because I'm almost certain not being allowed to work as a foreign student is the exception to the rule. A surface level Google search for Western European countries (BE/NL/FR/DE, typical places to go study abroad) shows me all of them allow non-EU students to get a job. You'll typically see these student workers in bars, restaurants, grocery stores, ...

RE the parent comment stating 500 EUR rent is potentially too much for a foreign student to afford, I can imagine it might be. But it's also too much to afford for plenty of native students, and a large share of them get these student jobs to be able to afford their student housing and the likes.

I was thinking of foreign student work restrictions in the US (https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/students-...), where you can’t work outside your subject and in some cases can’t work off-campus.

I looked at other countries and they have much less restrictions, so it seems you’re right and it’s more common than I thought.

I agree that mining is probably the worst of it, but trucks usually last a decade and a couple million kilometers, after which they’re shipped off to Africa or the Middle East where they’re kept on the road for much longer.

The Dutch simply shamelessly scratch their butt, and if someone's watching that's their problem ;)

I'd argue it's mostly trade news here, I'd assume the OP means commercial broadcasting, newspaper websites and the likes.

Very different for your psyche in my experience.

Depends on your trade I guess.

lots of links to newspaper websites on hn in my experience.

It's much worse in America, in my experience. Much more deviation in cars/sedans/trucks on the road, with different road heights each, and MUCH more custom stuff on top.

I'm in Belgium and headlights don't generally bother me too much, but a month in California recently had me going "no wonder everyone has tints here."

I'm in the Netherlands and I DO find it bad. Probably also has to do with my age (early fifties) - your eyes adjust with more difficulty the older you get, it seems.

I live close to you and I agree it's bad. But trust me, it's way worse in North America (where I also drive annually or so).

I do find it bad in Belgium, mostly on big cars like SUVs. Another reason for me to dislike them. Unfortunately they are getting more and more common.