wolfgang42
Joined 10 years ago
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Comment · 1 month ago
Comment · 1 month ago
I couldn’t find any documents on percentage of riders by payment method, but [1] says that in 2025 they actually got $14M more in fares than they budgeted for, partially because of “increased ridership that is paying full — or close to full — fares.”
Looking at the list of options on [2], your observed 1-in-5 Clipper taps seems within the realm of plausibility; there are a lot of ways to pay for Muni that aren’t visible to fellow passengers. In particular, out-of-towners who plan to ride Muni a lot are likely to get a MuniMobile (or, for the old-fashioned, paper) pass; and a ticket to any Chase Center event also counts as a Muni day pass. You also mentioned monthly passes (I know a lot of people who get them from their company’s commuter benefits), and there’s also transfers: not only are “single ride” fares valid for 2 hours, but if you board after 8:30pm you can’t tap again, because Clipper can’t handle it and you’ll be double charged!
[1] https://www.sfmta.com/projects/paying-your-fares-keeps-us-mo... [2] https://www.sfmta.com/getting-around/muni/fares
Comment · 11 months ago
I’m confused about for this assertion, for two reasons:
- My understanding is that OCSP stapling stops leaks, because the browser can get OCSP data from the server instead of needing to fetch it separately.
- Last I heard, Firefox was in the process of removing OCSP responder checks (precisely for privacy reasons) in favor of CRLite-based revocation checks—are you sure they didn’t remove whatever setting you’re referring to from the UI because it’s no longer relevant?
Comment · 1 year ago
Yes, the modifications you need to support it are trivially obvious (literally just replace “4 bytes” with “8 bytes” everywhere in the spec) and have been implemented by a number of authors, some of which this page links to. I guess it’s nice that they’ve been “officially” acknowledged, though.
Comment · 1 year ago
CDB is an interesting format, optimized for read-heavy write-rarely[1] random lookups on slow media. This isn’t a very common requirement these days, but it’s convenient for very specific use cases.
[1] You “update” by overwriting the entire file. This is remarkably fast and means that there’s no overhead/tracking for empty space, but it does mean you probably want this to be a fairly rare operation.
I rolled my own cdb reader library for a project a few years ago, and wrote up my notes on the format and its internals here: https://search.feep.dev/blog/post/2022-12-03-cdb-file-format
Comment · 1 year ago
We have no idea whether the signal had a pattern because the only recording we have of it consists of averages over 10-second samples, so any modulation <10s (or patterns larger than the 72s recording) would have been lost. It could have been an AM broadcast of a herd of circus elephants playing the William Tell Overture for all we know.
Comment · 1 year ago
From the article:
> there are about 230 billion* links that need visiting
> * Thanks to arkiver on the Archive Team IRC for correcting this number.
Also when running the Warrior project you could see it iterating through the range. I don't have any logs handy since the project is finished but they looked a bit like
https://goo.gl/gEdpoS: 404 Not Found
https://goo.gl/gEdpoT: 404 Not Found
https://goo.gl/gEdpoU: 302 Found -> https://...
https://goo.gl/gEdpoV: 404 Not FoundComment · 1 year ago
No they really are trying to enumerate all 230 billion possible shortlinks; that’s why they need so many people to help crawl everything.
Comment · 1 year ago
I know puns are considered the lowest form of humor, but I still appreciate the occasional bit of levity to lighten the mood in serious discussions.
Comment · 1 year ago
I think what you want is to just make a function and pass it the values:
const template = ({name}) => `hello ${name}`;
const n1 = template({ name: 'joe' });
Comment · 1 year ago
The judge’s report[1] lists twenty-eight different classes of failure, including:
- Confusing and buggy UI causing clerks to duplicate or mis-enter transactions
- Inventory getting “stuck” in branches after the product was discontinued; the attempt to remove it hid the inventory but caused its value to reappear on the books again each accounting period
- Failing touch screens entering spurious purchases overnight
- Incomplete rollback of distributed transactions
- Byzantine failures during hardware replacement causing multiple transactions to be assigned the same ID and overwrite each other
- Fujitsu employees with unaudited write access to the production database making one-off modifications
- The point of sale system simply telling the clerk to give too much change back to the customer
There’s no “one bug” here; the main failure was that those responsible continued to dismiss any problems as users being either in error or outright malicious, despite massive amounts of evidence that the system had technical flaws. Better quality software would have reduced the problems, but no system is bug-free and in many cases very little effort was made to identify the root causes of problems, much less to prevent similar ones from happening again.
[1] https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/bates-v-...
Comment · 1 year ago
Expecting Friends Journal to explain quakers is like wanting the IETF to tell you what a computer is; the target audience for this article are people who are way beyond needing an introduction to the topic, though of course on the Internet articles can end up in unexpected places.
A brief and reductive explanation: The Religious Society of Friends (colloquially “Quakers”) are a religious movement (nominally Christian, in practice often agnostic) which originated in England circa 1650. A core part of the theology is that God might speak to anyone, so worship generally consists of sitting around in silence until someone hears from Him and stands up to repeat the message, hence why the article is drawing parallels between that practice and Zen Buddhism.
> Cable cars are a symbol of San Francisco, a major tourist attraction, and an indelible feature of the city’s cultural and historical landscape. [...] While SPUR doesn’t recommend changing SFMTA’s role in cable car operations, the agency may wish to explore options to generate additional revenue from the cable car system or seek supplemental support from the city’s budget, given the outsized expense of providing cable car service and the unique value this mode brings to the city as a cultural attraction. SFMTA already acknowledges the special status of cable cars by pricing them differently from other modes and by excluding cable car service from some of its passes and fare discount programs.
Apart from that, I suspect the per-service-hour figure is particularly misleading for cable cars and removing one cable car from the schedule would free up significantly less than $871: there is a significant fixed overhead (from power usage and cable wear) to having the system running at all, regardless of how many cars are on it.
1: https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s... 2: https://www.cablecarmuseum.org/60th_Anniversay.html