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Comment · 5 days ago
UPDATE, for some reason edit did not work. (source, 20+ years experience working in traffic planning software industry).

Such data do exist. But they won't avail you (much). You have similar problems as when you optimise the energy sector, or economy in general. The "actual" problem you will be optimising on/for, has a lot of conflicting needs and interests, and choosing your trade-offs resemble the 'trolley problem'. I will just enumerate a random list of things that affect and collide with your optimisation.

- your vehicles and vehicle fleets (and road networks, with congestion) provide one part of the problem.

- your vehicle drivers etc., have other needs and union rules; they need to sleep, have breaks, go to the bathroom, eat; swap places on the road, they need to arrive and get home. - once you are on the road 'you might as well continue driving': There is a huge startup cost each time you pull into traffic.

- you have two peak hours (morning, evening); what should your drivers and buses do in the lull in the middle of the day? (spoiler: they reasonably hate sitting idle for 3 hours, with or without pay).

- lots of politics related to how it is funded and votes, who is paid for operating it. These are the shameful parents for things like frankenstein bus-routes, where 2-3 cancelled budget-cut bus-routes are merged into a single meandering remaining bus-route that makes all its passengers miserable.

- a lot of it is probablility-based/spontaneous; only some traffic patterns are regular (children to school); to service the probability-need, you need a regular service that may run empty/low half of the time, until people need a hair-cut.

The whole thing is handled on a sliding-scale/spectrum, ordered by how short/far into the future, the travel is/can be planned. On one end, you have taxi/uber, which is on-the-spot travel. The other end is planned year-service, e.g. a summer schedule of a bus. In between, with computers we have a lot of "urgent-but-planned" flexi-flexible traffic, where people book on the day or the week, and a number of bookings are then weaved to be driven like a pearl string (so e.g. a number of people will share a ride in a medium sized bus, that does pre-planned pseudo-taxi-service.)

UPDATE: an example of the differences in the setups: Typically, Europe and US will fund/run buses/public transport differently.

in US, traditionally, you would task a company with running the whole operation: Both plan the services to be provided, and then implement/deploy/operate them. So they would both decide the structure of the bus services to be offered, and then do the actual operations of the same plan.

in Europe/many parts, they instead divide like this: A public transport authority designs the structure of the services to be operated (this many buses, running these roads, at these intervals, and ALSO _at these times_). The 'times' part is important, because it determines which transfers are possible (between two lines). That package will then be tendered to private companies, who bid on running those planned operations; they are then paid by the public transport authority, what they offered to operate for in the contract.

These two structures give wildly different transport structures and operations structures. In the european model, it leads to very complex timetables, where bus services are trimmed to the perceived demand - every week, hour, day where the demand is perceived to be less, is cut from the planned timetables. So when you look at the time tables, you need to check complex date periods for whether the bus you want is operating today or not. The reasoning is of course, that since the transport authority must pay for each trip serviced, they try to cut any trip they don't "need".

Contrast that to the american, "older" model, with a full-service operator. They already have their money, and are already running and out on the roads with their equipment. To them, it doesnt matter much, whether they run 5 additional trips between 22:30 and 23:30 or not; they already paid the costs of having a driver present, and bought the buses, so once they are running, might as well keep them running (a similar thing in the middle of the day, in the lull.)

I of course "prefer" the european model, but I can see the issues it causes too (it makes things more complex but better trimmed and fitted.)

As an example, these differences made it so we had difficulty offering the same planning software for europeans and americans, because the planners simply needed different tools for their scenarios.

Comment · 5 days ago
(source, 20+ years experience working in traffic planning software industry). Such data do exist. But they won't avail you (much). You have similar problems as when you optimise the energy sector, or economy in general. The "actual" problem you will be optimising on/for, has a lot of conflicting needs and interests, and choosing your trade-offs resemble the 'trolley problem'. I will just enumerate a random list of things that affect and collide with your optimisation. - your vehicles and vehicle fleets (and road networks, with congestion) provide one part of the problem. - your vehicle drivers etc., have other needs and union rules; they need to sleep, have breaks, go to the bathroom, eat; swap places on the road, they need to arrive and get home. - once you are on the road 'you might as well continue driving': There is a huge startup cost each time you pull into traffic. - you have two peak hours (morning, evening); what should your drivers and buses do in the lull in the middle of the day? (spoiler: they reasonably hate sitting idle for 3 hours, with or without pay). - lots of politics related to how it is funded and votes, who is paid for operating it. These are the shameful parents for things like frankenstein bus-routes, where 2-3 cancelled budget-cut bus-routes are merged into a single meandering remaining bus-route that makes all its passengers miserable.

- a lot of it is probablility-based/spontaneous; only some traffic patterns are regular (children to school); to service the probability-need, you need a regular service that may run empty/low half of the time, until people need a hair-cut.

The whole thing is handled on a sliding-scale/spectrum, ordered by how short/far into the future, the travel is/can be planned. On one end, you have taxi/uber, which is on-the-spot travel. The other end is planned year-service, e.g. a summer schedule of a bus. In between, with computers we have a lot of "urgent-but-planned" flexi-flexible traffic, where people book on the day or the week, and a number of bookings are then weaved to be driven like a pearl string (so e.g. a number of people will share a ride in a medium sized bus, that does pre-planned pseudo-taxi-service.)

Comment · 23 days ago
He is guilty of being smallfry and not a billionaire.
Comment · 26 days ago
I don't know if this has been mentioned already, but I like arigato in japanese being similar to the portuguese similar sounding word, obrigado.
Comment · 1 month ago
I too am on DCC; I wonder why I like it, but I do. Strangely, one of the things it reminds me of, is the Malazan-Book-of-the-fallen series, in spite of how different they are. I was/have been on the 'book that wouldnt burn' series; I still have to read the final third book. Ironically, I have not yet finished that series because I dread it; the author is a little too good at writing truly loathable antagonists, and at the same time reading him, you have learned he cares little for plot armor ('if he dies, he dies', sigh.) Other than that, Piranesi by Susanne Clarke; I have also gotten her earlier book, but not gotten far into it yet.

DCC is strangely hypocritical - a massive commercial success where we the readers revel-wallow in the graphic suffering of the fictive protagonists/victims, and author & co are making truckloads of profits, precisely on the kinds of sheenanigans the books on the surface critisize :-). It is also a bit ironic, that the books/Carl critisize fascism, while at the same time, Carl is on a kind of one-man fascist/tyrant purging the existing elite, with summary and graphic executions. Sigh :-)

Comment · 1 month ago
It is even worse, we had decent answers for some of the stuff back in the 40s, 50s and 60s (e.g. Dijkstra's work on concurrency, before there even were computers to run them on.) Someone will reply to my comment with Lovelace or Babbage or Pascal :-/
Comment · 1 month ago
The worse part is whatever competent hoodlums will arrive after him, to enjoy the gates he has crashed
Comment · 2 months ago
I know HN is not that kind of site, but I have a hard time suppressing the knowledge that "step 3 is profit", and now we arguably know what step 2 is.
Comment · 2 months ago
switzerland is not currently at risk of a US invasion
Comment · 2 months ago
this is another data point in my "year of the linux desktop"; linux is slowly becoming a decent option, not so much because of linux improving leaps and bounds, so much as what happens on the windows side collapsing on its own. 10 years ago, I was used to that windows "of course" would have drivers available for stuff.
Comment · 3 months ago
It makes sense to ask WHY this is hard. People can disagree endlessly on why. But a big part is, that antitrust/monopoly legislation has been almost completely dismantled and detoothed within the last 35 years, starting back with Reagan, and accelerating through the 90's when Clinton was at the wheel. The tiny bit that is still left, is only enforced either when parties fail to pay the bribe, or are bribed to enforce it, by other actors. Once you allow markets to consolidate into a single monolith, any new competitors will only be allowed to live, until they become big enough for the established incumbent to notice and then squish, with their unlimited access to resources. There is little incentive to start a competing business, if you know the trajectory is "IF SUCCESS THEN SQUISH".
Comment · 4 months ago
I'm not sure you can blame the GNOME people for not trying. Personally, I feel like they are actively trying to make it worse, ie they are not passive. Their approach to file system dialogs (open file/folder, save file), was what got me to finally realize, that I must necessarily prefer KDE, because I must necessarily prefer anything that is not GNOME. Now if I could only figure out how to stop KDE from opening file dialogs ALWAYS BEHIND ALL OTHER WINDOWS, that would be even better, but you can't have it all..

One day, when I die, and go to heaven or hell, when I arrive, my first question to the ones receiving me, will be "Finally, tell me - is there ANY possible way to navigate upwards to the parent folder, in GNOME?"

Comment · 4 months ago
I concur, I would say evolution is more like "adaption" than improvement.
Comment · 5 months ago
This reminds me of trying to use File Explorer in Windows 11. I wish I could turn all their electron-app "improvements" off, to make it useful again, like it once was.. Case in point: Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs, I need a single tab, and a window title bar so I can drag the damn thing around. And.. my single tab, now tries to show the folder name, truncated to a few useless characters, so I now have tabs called "C:\folder\sub1\...", while the rest of the row is EMPTY SPACE (which I, admittedly can still use to drag the window around; thank you for that, but it will probably be filled with ADS come next month.)

"Oh, but you can just see the folder name in the address bar in the next row instead then!"

NO I CAN'T. Because they electron-css-screwed that up too.. It now shows a bunch of toolbar buttons <- -> ^ , then a computer screen??, then >, then [...] Then they truncate the file path to only show parts of it, starting the rest with ... Is it because we are out of space? I don't know, every part of the folder path has been separated with [ > ] (because / or \ was obviously the worst idea ever.) Then, to the right of it all, we get a big [Search log ] edit field, followed by a spyglass. So, I get two broken displays of the actual folder path, and a lot of 'candy' I did not ask for. Why does the search tool need so much space, before I am using it at all? What does it need, apart from maybe the single spyglass icon? Instead, the actual path that my object by necessity ALWAYS will have, has been chopped up to unrecognisability.

It reeks of KPI and bonus performance reviews, "we must improve the round shape of the wheel, to get our bonus and not be downsized".

Comment · 6 months ago
or bombings

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