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There has been speculation Rachel Reeves could introduce a number of major property tax changes in the Autumn Budget.

Student thought she had the hang of this 'Linux' thing and its kooky CLI

Who, Me?  It's Monday morning, and a week of possibilities presents itself to IT pros everywhere. Which is why The Register brings you another edition of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which we remind you what not to do with your day, your week, and your career, by sharing stories of your worst workplace mistakes and the contortions you made to survive them.…

Dates are messy things, full of complicated edge cases and surprising ways for our assumptions to fail. They lack the pure mathematical beauty of other data types, like integers. But that absence doesn't mean we can't apply the beautiful, concise, and simple tools of functional programming to handling dates.

I mean, you or I could. J Banana's co-worker seems to struggle a bit with it.

/** * compare two dates, rounding them to the day */ private static int compareDates( LocalDateTime date1, LocalDateTime date2 ) { List<BiFunction<LocalDateTime,LocalDateTime,Integer>> criterias = Arrays.asList( (d1,d2) -> d1.getYear() - d2.getYear(), (d1,d2) -> d1.getMonthValue() - d2.getMonthValue(), (d1,d2) -> d1.getDayOfMonth() - d2.getDayOfMonth() ); return criterias.stream() .map( f -> f.apply(date1, date2) ) .filter( r -> r != 0 ) .findFirst() .orElse( 0 ); }

This Java code creates a list containing three Java functions. Each function will take two dates and returns an integer. It then streams that list, applying each function in turn to a pair of dates. It then filters through the list of resulting integers for the first non-zero value, and failing that, returns just zero.

Why three functions? Well, because we have to check the year, the month, and the day. Obviously. The goal here is to return a negative value if date1 preceeds date2, zero if they're equal, and positive if date1 is later. And on this metric… it does work. That it works is what makes me hate it, honestly. This not only shouldn't work, but it should make the compiler so angry that the computer gets up and walks away until you've thought about what you've done.

Our submitter replaced all of this with a simple:

return date1.toLocalDate().compareTo( date2.toLocalDate() ); .comment { border; none; } [Advertisement] ProGet’s got you covered with security and access controls on your NuGet feeds. Learn more.

The Daily Mail understands that No 10 knew at the start of last week that the Labour grandee had suggested Jeffrey Epstein's first conviction was wrongful and should be challenged.

Rita Ora cheekily found herself in the role of third wheel when she hit the Emmys red carpet in Los Angeles with her husband, Taika Waititi, on Sunday night.

The pop megastar typically steals the show when she heads to Arrowhead Stadium to watch her beau in action, yet she opted to do so secretively for Kansas City's Super Bowl rematch with Philadelphia.

The displays will take place over seven weeks

She had lied about inheritance money to pay the man back

The Oscar-winning actor, 56, urged those watching to support the 'Free Palestine' movement in an interview on the red carpet.

'He was a beloved teenager in an iconic television series with the world watched grow into man,' Rashad said from the Peacock Theatre at LA Live in Los Angeles .

The actress, 57, got back in character as Walter White's wife in for a new commercial for beverage brand Popwell nearly 12 years after the hit crime drama series' finale aired.

Stephen Colbert made a plea to Hollywood to hire his staff after his late night talk show was cancelled two months earlier.

The comedian, 48, left viewers stunned and confused after an explicit portion of his very brief, 15-second speech was cut out during the live broadcast of the awards show.

For her latest head-turning red carpet appearance, Jenna, 22, brought back memories of the character in a barely-there top made entirely of jewels , with no bra.

The 46-year-old blockbuster comedian left the crowd of showbiz luminaries in stitches with his routine, kicking off the ceremony in style.

It's named among the best cafes in Essex in the EssexEats awards

Virtualization tool for hyperscalers now scales to 8,192 vCPUs

The Cloud Hypervisor project has introduced a No AI code policy.…

Vice President JD Vance will host the next episode of the Charlie Kirk Show in honor of the late MAGA influencer.

Debatably one of the worst dressed or the best-dressed celebrity on the red carpet, this talented icon transformed into the popular collectible toy with Chinese details as an homage to her heritage.

"Engineers from Ohio State University are developing a new way to power rocket engines," reports Gizmodo, "using liquid uranium for a faster, more efficient form of nuclear propulsion that could deliver round trips to Mars within a single year..." Nuclear propulsion uses a nuclear reactor to heat a liquid propellant to extremely high temperatures, turning it into a gas that's expelled through a nozzle and used to generate thrust. The newly developed engine concept, called the centrifugal nuclear thermal rocket (CNTR), uses liquid uranium to heat rocket propellant directly. In doing so, the engine promises more efficiency than traditional chemical rockets, as well as other nuclear propulsion engines, according to new research published in Acta Astronautica... Traditional chemical engines produce about 450 seconds of thrust from a given amount of propellant, a measure known as specific impulse. Nuclear propulsion engines can reach around 900 seconds, with the CNTR possibly pushing that number even higher. "You could have a safe one-way trip to Mars in six months, for example, as opposed to doing the same mission in a year," Spencer Christian, a PhD student at Ohio State and leader of CNTR's prototype construction, said in a statement. CNTR promises faster routes, but it could also use different types of propellant, like ammonia, methane, hydrazine, or propane, that can be found in asteroids or other objects in space. "Some potential hurdles include ensuring that the methods used for startup, operation and shutdown avoid instabilities," according to the researchers' announcement, as well as "envisioning ways to minimize the loss of uranium fuel and accommodate potential engine failures." But "This team's CNTR concept is expected to reach design readiness within the next five years..."

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