DMCA notice against oh-my-fish - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2015-09-22-wahoo.md <comment><USER2> Although this takedown notice evidences some... confusion... about how open source is supposed to work, it looks to me like the target actually _did_ infringe the filer's copyright by stripping his name off the copyright headers, which is the one thing that the MIT license doesn't allow.

</comment><comment><USER3> What are the broader implications of this with respect to the rather permissive nature of the MIT license? I mean, it grants users the ability to outright copy the code, provided that they include a copy of the license. If oh-my-fish included the copyright notice, then regardless of any disagreement between the repo owners, it seems that the author of wahoo has no ground to stand on here. Can someone explain otherwise?

<comment><USER4> You are correct. If oh-my-fish properly included the copyright and permission notice of the MIT license, then they are within the bounds of the license. It doesn't matter what the author's requests are, they can use it if they attribute properly. Of course, the author can henceforth change the license for any future code, preventing any unauthorized forks, which would be against then open-source spirit of the MIT license.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for validating my logic. I wanted to make sure that there wasn't some major gotcha in the MIT license that I missed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Without additional context, it appears this is just some high school drama going on in a relatively minor project? I mean, yeah, clearly the MIT License would seem to be at odds with his stated reasoning...

But this is not a war between companies. It's just some young guy who decided to let his friends clone his project, and then he had a falling out with them, so he unilaterally tried to un-clone it and use the DMCA to do so? Childish, and maybe it will succeed and maybe it won't.... but it's just one doofus on a nothing project....

<comment><USER6> So ... Companies rights are more important than individuals?

<comment><USER5> No, I'm not saying that at all. What I'm saying is that drama involving about 4 or 5 people is not very important to the rest of the world. If I create a github project containing my favorite vim color scheme, and then I get in an argument with a friend and try to have his fork deleted, will everyone on hacker news talk about me too?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If oh-my-fish properly included the copyright and permission notice of the MIT license, then they are within the bounds of the license. It doesn't matter what the author's requests are, they can use it if they attribute properly. But they failed to do so and the creator's copyright was not credited, so they are in violation of MIT, which is pretty lame considering how easy it is to use MIT code in a compliant way. I am afraid this DMCA is legit.

</comment><comment><USER8> So many comments are focusing on the MIT license. That is the license that applies if you obtain it via Github and redistribute it.

But this...

>> On August 26, 2015, I, @bucaran, and "oh-my-fish" collaborators, led by @bpinto, decided to replace the entire source code of "oh-my-fish!" with the entire source code of "wahoo", but keeping the "oh-my-fish" name.

... sounds like giving he consented to give ownership of the code to the oh- my-fish project, and is retroactively trying to apply the terms of the MIT project now that they've had a falling out. I think the takedown needs to be reversed.

<comment><USER9> Replacing the code in the shared repository doesn't mean he transferred the copyright to them. When you contribute to a project, you still own the copyright, you just provided a licensed copy, and that project must still comply with it.

<comment><USER10> This is correct. For an arbitrary and hypothetical example, imagine that Linus woke up yesterday and decided to convert the Linux kernel to an Apache licensed project. The long and almost impossible task would be to contact each and every contributor to the Linux kernel and ask for the permission to change the license of their contribution. The "short" and "easy" task would be to write a new kernel and replace all of Linux with it, applying the new license. The old Linux kernel would still be a GPL project, but moving forward any contributions would need to be Apache licensed.

It appears that the latter example is somewhat like what happened here. The old Oh-My-Fish project was some licensed project. It could have even been a WTF Public License[0] that _did_ allow contributors to fork and remove attribution. At some point, all the code in the repo was replaced with new code under the MIT license that served the same purpose, and the repo's name was changed. Moving forward, someone continued to merge in the new code to the old repo and tried to remove attribution to the new code, breaking the new code's license.

The Oh-My-Fish project could have done a classical fork, severing ties with the Wahoo project just before the merge of the re-written code happened and continue to work in isolation, but it seems that they did not.

[0] [http://www.wtfpl.net](http://www.wtfpl.net)

<comment><USER11> So if a contribution changes the LICENSE file without having every contributor agreement, won't this be an invalid LICENSE change?

From what I heard about the discussion, it seems like the LICENSE file has been altered by Jorge without all the OMF's contributors agreeing upon.

<comment><USER12> It's invalid only if the license change is inconsistent with the original license. That's why, for example, converting a project from MIT to GPL is fine, because doing so doesn't violate the terms of the MIT license.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So apart from bruised egos and non-attribution the major issue seems to be repo-stars?

I don't claim to understand what's going on at all or who is in the right/wrong but reading the GH issue discussion it's about repo ownership? Maybe I'm naive and easy to push around but why not just fork, re-add your copyright and start from 0 stars...only the code should matter, right?

<comment><USER14> From my understanding the oh-my-fish project has been around for a while and likely has some size of following. So the problem I see is the members of the organization using that existing notoriety to gain credit for the work the Wahoo creator did without citing it as his/hers. The fork and re-add wouldn't have the desired effect then because likely the core audience of OhMyFish still wouldn't see it.

Although I'm not sure if I'm missing something here as well, your guess is as good as mine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Err, is that how DMCA works? Can the copyright owner retroactively change conditions of the license [1]?

[1] [https://github.com/wa/wahoo/blob/master/LICENSE](https://github.com/wa/wahoo/blob/master/LICENSE)

<comment><USER16> > Permission is hereby granted [...] and to permit persons to whom the > Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in > all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

In his DMCA notice on Github, the author states that the copyright was not left intact. I'm not certain whether he can void the whole license for "oh-my- fish" because of that or not.

<comment><USER17> That's exactly what the "subject to the following conditions" means. They have _no_ right to use the code if the copyright notice provisions are not followed, following those conditions are what gives you the right to use the code.

If I give a license to use my code on the condition you pay me money, if you don't pay you also don't get to use my code.

<comment><USER16> I guess what I'm saying is: If they adjusted their code to comply with the license (i.e. add the copyright back), can they retroactively agree to the terms of the license?

Or in fact, does the creator of the original project have the ability to say "I no longer offer this license to you"?

<comment><USER7> He can't. Even if he authored all of the code in OhMyFish/Wahoo, which maybe be the case, the OhMyFish folk can rightly use the entire source of Wahoo granted they comply to the MIT license, which they didn't hence the DMCA takedown:

        The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

<comment><USER16> Yes, I was the one who initially noted that he didn't comply with that clause. I was wondering whether the original creator could retroactively revoke the MIT license permanently from the guy who abused the license.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As with most things, this probably began as a communication problem between Jorge and Bruno, and it quickly went south from there. [https://github.com/wa/wahoo/issues/95](https://github.com/wa/wahoo/issues/95)

If you'd like to try a Fish shell framework with a bit less drama, my I suggest my alternative? (^_^)

[https://github.com/justinmayer/tacklebox](https://github.com/justinmayer/tacklebox)

[https://github.com/justinmayer/tackle](https://github.com/justinmayer/tackle)

<comment><USER11> Your plugins are copy and paste of several plugins used by Oh My Fish. Lucky for you Jorge has no ownership on those so he can't claim a DCMA Takedown.

<comment><USER18> That's not a fair claim. While some of the plugins come from OMF, proper attribution is given in the license.

Moreover, the majority of plugins in the repository do not, in fact, come from OMF.

<comment><USER11> You might want to add the LICENSE to the following plugins then: extract, grc, pip and python. (4 out of 7 plugins)

<comment><USER18> We disagree regarding the provenance of some of those plugins. That said, I'll take another look and see if I can do a better job at giving proper credit where it is due.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Github issue discussion: [https://github.com/wa/wahoo/issues/95](https://github.com/wa/wahoo/issues/95)

<comment><USER20> Also this: [https://gitter.im/fishline/fin](https://gitter.im/fishline/fin)

And this: [https://github.com/derekstavis/diary-of-a-stolen- repository](https://github.com/derekstavis/diary-of-a-stolen-repository)

This is about a lot more than the MIT license. Folks, be clear about the copyright assignment of code that you contribute to projects, and project admins, keep an eye on those copyrights.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> For another perspective, here is a comment by @bpinto (OMF creator I think?) which @bucaran deleted from [https://github.com/wa/wahoo/issues/95](https://github.com/wa/wahoo/issues/95) :

[http://dump.thecybershadow.net/7ff5a1088842959fb4d8d4be7d3ab...](http://dump.thecybershadow.net/7ff5a1088842959fb4d8d4be7d3ab0b7/00000194.png)

<comment><USER11> Jorge Bucaran stole the project and destroyed it? An open source project? Shame on you! That everyone that work with you know about your actions here!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Didn't they give everyone a license to copy their work?

(Due to the DCMA takedown, I can't see whether they honoured the MIT copyright condition.)

[https://github.com/wa/wahoo/blob/master/LICENSE](https://github.com/wa/wahoo/blob/master/LICENSE)

... Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. ...

<comment><USER4> They did, under the condition that "above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."

If oh-my-fish didn't include the copyright notice and permission notice for wahoo's code they were using, then this is a valid use of the DMCA.

MIT doesn't mean you're free to use with abandon. You still have to credit and provide the license.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Since you can't read oh-my-fish's repository now, can anyone answer this: did oh-my-fish's code give attribution to bucaran?

<comment><USER23> No, they did not. The copyright was changed from my name to "Bruno Ferreira Pinto".

<comment><USER11> I have the code here and it's LICENSED for Oh My Fish, not for you bucaran.

Update: It seems like the solution is simple:

1\. Oh My Fish repo changes the LICENSE to Licensed for Oh My Fish. 2\. As Fin is a separate project that won't even share the same code, it is going to be licensed to bucaran. 3\. Community is happy again! :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The DMCA is finally protecting the people it is meant to protect: content creators that otherwise were powerless against people who stole work.

And to people who say this could have been solved more amicably in a different way: This is obviously being used as a last resort in this case. Obviously all other avenues of resolution have been exhausted.

<comment><USER25> I'm not sure I would go that far in this case. The licence of Wahoo is as follows:

"Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."

To me, that means anyone can fork it and do whatever they want with it, as long as they keep that copyright notice intact.

<comment><USER26> > To me, that means anyone can fork it and do whatever they want with it, as > long as they keep that copyright notice intact.

Which they didn't, and that's why this is a great reason to file a DMCA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> We decided to reconcile and end the litigation amicably adding an AUTHORS file and the following copyright:

* Copyright (c) 2015 Oh My Fish!

</comment><comment><USER27> 17 USC 512(f), come back, we miss you.</comment>


Self-hosted alternatives to popular cloud services - <AUTHOR> http://liminality.xyz/self-hosting/ <comment><USER2> If you wanna try all that without installing, you can have a look at [http://sandstorm.io](http://sandstorm.io)</comment>


SOPA has NOT been postponed until 2012 - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111216/11102617108/sopa-markup-runs-out-time-likely-delayed-until-2012.shtml?update=1

<comment><USER2> It depends on what the full chambers do, but this could be a strategy to:

1) Disarm the opposition by making them think they have more time (i.e. the initial "until 2012" reports);

2) Railroad the legislation through more "quietly" and "at the last minute" while the public (and legislators, to the extent they aren't already fully in the camp of this legislation) are distracted with the impending holiday weekend and their attendant long-standing, personal commitments to family, travel, and all that;

3) Bury news of all this (to the extent the mainstream media has not already almost entirely ignored it) in the holiday-eve end of news cycle (akin to the "take out the trash" Friday / holiday weekend news releases that shows such as "The West Wing" helped to shine a light on with respect to general awareness).</comment>


As the U.S. fantasizes, the world builds high speed rail - <AUTHOR> http://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2017/07/01/a-generational-failure-as-the-u-s-fantasizes-the-rest-of-the-world-builds-a-new-transport-system/ <comment><USER2> For those who think it's because of geography / hyperloop is better technology anyways / any other red herring besides Brezhnevian political stagnation:

It's not completely implausible that, 30 years from now, most of Europe and Asia are connected by hyperloops while the US has built nothing and Internet commentators are arguing that hyperloop is old news compared to yet-unproven teleportation technology, and anyways the population density of the US doesn't support hyperloops.

<comment><USER3> Installing "high speed" rail that's less than 200mph in the US today is like installing 6MB copper DSL and calling it a win.

Notice developing economies are going wireless/fiber and skipping the "legacy" generation, the US should be doing the same with MagLev/hyperloop.

The issue is we spend our money policing the world/blowing up countries then paying to rebuild them. If we weren't so hell-bent on global hegemony we could spend more on infrastructure at home.

<comment><USER4> It'd be more accurate to leave off the "we" that you insist on using to artificially bolster your premise.

George W. Bush was elected on a platform of no more nation building (and secured his second term in an atmosphere of fear and war), as was Donald Trump. It's very clear that the majority of Americans do not want more war & nation building (the only ones that do, are a contingent of conservatives like McCain and even fewer similar hawks on the other side).

The globalists + military industrial complex go ahead and do what they want anyway, against the wishes of the American public. They've been doing so for a long, long time now. Vietnam was not a very popular war, they did it anyway. The notion of no longer blowing up the Middle East and treating Russia as a villain, was impossible for them to stomach re Trump, so the CIA & fellow globalists (aka the deep state, media, etc) immediately went on _hyper_ attack (oh the consequences of going against the machine).

<comment><USER5> > as was Donald Trump

>The notion of no longer blowing up the Middle East and treating Russia as a villain, was impossible for them to stomach re Trump,

Ah, yes, which is why he's threatening North Korea, attacking airfields in Syria, selling weapons to Saudi Arabia (which is currently in a war with Yemen), bombing in Afghanistan, in his own words giving the military "total authorization", authorized a raid in Yemen, and the list goes on.

You were _sold_ no more nation building, by a man who has interests in having his fingers everywhere in the globe. That you bought it hook, line and sinker is yet another problem.

In the same way, the Vietnam war was reasonably popular at first. It was barely around 67 and after countless deaths that the opinion was overwhelmingly negative, forcing the US to go back tail between its legs.

Maybe Americans no longer want war. Every single leader they are electing certainly doesn't share that opinion though. So, either they actually quite enjoy playing world police, or they're quite frankly so manipulable it becomes scary. But go on ahead and blame "the globalists" and "the deep state" (which, intended or not, is very much an InfoWars term, not exactly a reputable source), I am certain that'll do a lot of good.

<comment><USER6> _So, either they actually quite enjoy playing world police, or they 're quite frankly so manipulable it becomes scary._

'Both' is also an option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The problems affecting high-speed rail in the US are the same problems that prevent low-speed rail, streetcars, subways, and buses from being more common -- people don't see themselves using such things and so they don't want to pay for them.

In the Bay Area, the Caltrain commuter train runs from San Jose to San Francisco, through the downtown areas of most major cities in between. It is currently so popular that it is significantly over capacity every day. Yet it is still a constant political battle to get funding to improve the system, even though the Bay Area is one of the most educated and politically liberal parts of the country, where support for public transit is higher than many other places.

Sometimes I think we would have much more transit funding overall if we set aside part of the transit budget to send Americans to other countries on vacation, so they will return knowing how good public transit can actually be.

<comment><USER8> I do not think this is true. I think people have an easier time seeing themselves in an Acela car than they do in a Jetblue seat --- which is part of why the Acela is so popular. People don't _drive_ from DC to NYC so they can signal their independence. Pretty much, they don't _drive_ from DC to NYC at all.

Where HSR is feasible and built out in the US, it gets used. The problem is, HSR isn't feasible for the most economically important routes in the US.

You can get from London to Paris in 3 hours on a train, and from Paris to Frankfurt in about 5. Almost as a rule, the most economically central European cities are closer to each other by rail than the most important American cities are --- excepting the Eastern Seaboard, _where we have rail_ \--- by _air_.

<comment><USER9> Have you ridden Acela and done so frequently? It's not that great of an experience of you haven't. Expensive and often delayed.

<comment><USER10> Expensive, often delayed, people noisy and talking loudly in the so-called "quiet car", slow to non-existent internet connectivity, etc.

<comment><USER11> Do you rely on provided internet? Doesn't your phone LTE work well?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm on a vacation in Italy and just used one this morning from Florence to Bologna with Trenitalia. A lot of positive things: The ride was 35 minutes long, doesn't include any security theater, you can arrive the station 10 minutes before the departure and hop in a couple of minutes, comfortable, roomy, from city center to almost city center, and many more. And the train continued to all the way to Turin, visiting many cities including Milan in 2-3 hours. Cost was 16ish euros, I guess (deducing from a total payment for four people).

Doing the same though air travel would add at least a total of 2-3 hours for the whole thing. Don't know about the cost comparison but the user satisfaction is there.

<comment><USER13> Frankly the lack of security frightens me. It's only cool til someone stands up on your car and pulls out an AR. Then suddenly it's "what were they thinking."

Happened in France, fortunately with no casualties...

<comment><USER14> > It's only cool til someone stands up on your car and pulls out an AR

It continues to be cool for the thousands of other trips that day and the millions of other trips afterwards where that doesn't happen.

Better to build a society that doesn't create people who feel the need to mow down a train car full of people than to treat everyone else like a criminal a priori.

<comment><USER13> I agree 100%, but I don't think we're in that society yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This topic comes up routinely on Hacker News, and it's no surprise why: there are a lot of Europeans interacting with a lot of Americans here, and European high speed rail is an enviable asset for the continent.

But last time we talked about this, it seemed to me that if you looked into the details, it was clear why we don't have HSR in the US. Even assuming we built a network that operated at Shanghai Maglev speeds, at the distances the network would need to operate, air travel would remain significantly more economical.

In a thread 3 years ago, I made a list of the top US cities by GDP, and then broke out the crow-flies ground distances between them:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8713324](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8713324)

Of the 55 edges on this graph, only 6 were 700 miles apart or less. Several of those are already served by the Acela.

There's a definite advantage to rail over air, in that rail can deposit you right in the middle of the city you're heading to. But that advantage can't make up for the fact that no train is going to compete with a plane for trips between the largest US cities.

<comment><USER15> I'm not convinced that the numbers in your link are quite so conclusive.

First, with stops factored in, the Acela makes about 75 mph. This is competitive with _driving_ , not flying. There's a lot of room for improvement right there.

Second, I'm not sure that distance between the biggest cities matters. Is there actually a ton of traffic between Philly and Los Angles, for example? You could easily imagine several unconnected networks (SF-LA-SD, for example, along with an upgraded Boston-DC route, or something between Austin, Houston, and Dallas).

In a similar vein, you could imagine connecting one major city to a bunch of somewhat smaller ones. For example, Chicago to Madison, Milwaukee, or even Minneapolis. This wouldn't necessarily _replace_ air travel, but it would integrate those cities more tightly and might replace a lot of driving. Madison to Chicago even becomes a (somewhat) reasonable commute!

<comment><USER8> At European rail speeds, a train from Chicago to Minneapolis --- which, as a Chicagoan who likes Minneapolis, I wish existed! --- would take 6-7 hours. A flight from Chicago to Minneapolis takes just an hour and a half, and there are so many of them that catching one is no harder than catching a train.

On the list I provided, where do you see major opportunities for us to build out rail? I know that there are some! I just don't think there are many, or that it will ever make sense for us to have a densely connected HSR network like Europe.

<comment><USER16> The distance between Chicago and Minneapolis is slightly higher than the distance between Paris and Montpellier.

For those cities in France, the time travel from city center to city center is about 3 hours and half by train, with 2 stops on the way. It beats both car and air travel, since you can just to show up at the station 5 minutes before the train departs, and don't need to go through security.

Also, the cheap tickets cost less than 50 euro, and you can get between 25% and 50% discount if you are less than 25 years old.

<comment><USER17> Realistically you'll never get tickets that cheap unless you plan weeks in advance, though.

The French train system is expensive and too centralized. You'll find many examples of how great French trains are but everyone only ever talks about traveling to or from Paris. And sure, it's great and convenient for Parisians.

But when you want to connect two mid-size, non-Paris cities that are more than ~500 km apart, travel by train becomes a time-consuming and expensive affair. For instance, taking the train from Nancy to Grenoble costs about 120€ if you're lucky; it forces you to take a massive detour through Paris and change train stations there. Changing stations in Paris is stressful and takes at least half an hour - since there are no shuttles, you must take the subway (and change subway lines too!)

All in all, what should have been a 3 hour journey becomes a costly 7-8 hour ordeal, thanks to the extreme centralization of the French rail network. Many people are getting fed up with this -- carpooling across long distances is becoming popular because it can often be faster and much cheaper than rail!

<comment><USER18> Just an annecdote, it is possible to regularly get tickets that cheap if using igtv or ouigo. I was in Montpelier last month and found a ticket for 25€ to Paris.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> chroem- Unpopular opinion, but I really don't see why we should want high speed rail in the first place. It's slower than flying on a commuter airline, but the tickets cost nearly as much, and it's also _enormously_ expensive to build. Then there's also the issue of throughput and last mile logistics. You're limited to putting people in a few train cars, as opposed to a continuous stream of people on a freeway. Being a high speed train, stops are necessarily few and far between, so once you arrive at the station you still have to figure out how to travel tens of miles to where you really want to go.

My perception is that it's a huge money pit for something that's quite frankly inferior to our current infrastructure. We would be much better off improving our current insterstate system.

<comment><USER19> Rail is superior to highways on quite a few dimensions:

\- faster (200 Km/h and up)

\- much lower accident per passenger mile

\- in _theory_ it should be cheaper (it isn't for a variety of reasons, many of those are political)

\- it allows you to work while you're in motion (much harder in a car or a plane)

\- more land efficient

\- connects the _centers_ of cities rather than the outskirts which in many cases removes that last mile problem because the majority of traffic is city- to-city

For the United States the situation is better served anyway by comparing rail and air travel, air travel scales better as the distance increases, is (roughly) comparable in cost per ticket and tends to be faster on longer distances.

<comment><USER20> I suspect that by the time we could build a high speed rail network in the US (say 30-40 years, minimum) autonomous vehicles on the freeway will be the superior option. There's no fundamental reason that road vehicles couldn't exceed 200kph, just that humans are completely incapable of piloting safely at anywhere near those speeds. Once the need for a forward-looking pilot is gone you could design vehicles completely around the comfort of the occupants.

And, better than HSR, the same vehicle can go door-to-door.

<comment><USER19> > here's no fundamental reason that road vehicles couldn't exceed 200kph

Actually, there is: energy costs for road traffic go up as the square of the velocity, for rail this is much better because there is only one (very aerodynamic) front section for as many carriages as you want to put behind the loc and steel-on-steel has much better rolling resistance than rubber-on- asphalt or concrete.

<comment><USER20> That's a fair point, what's the energy cost of building thousands of miles of new railways, rather than using existing freeways? (okay, I'm being a little facetious)

With regard to aerodynamics, I am assuming that following distances for advanced autonomous vehicles will be minimal. They could maybe drive bumper- to-bumper as long as all cars in the ... er ... train were similarly capable.

<comment><USER21> Track costs far less (in money and energy) to build and maintain than freeway.

<comment><USER22> Unlike roads, fixed rail is virtually guaranteed not to be where you are, or to go where you want to go.

There is a reason the US isn't well-connected by rail, and it has nothing to do with loony conspiracy theories about General Motors buying all the tracks up.

<comment><USER21> > Unlike roads, fixed rail is virtually guaranteed not to be where you are, or > to go where you want to go.

For no reason except the political. Go to any country in Europe, and you'll find that even the shopping malls have railway sidings and not just truck loading bays.

<comment><USER22> To us, 200 years seems like a long time. To you, 200 kilometers seems like a long distance.

<comment><USER21> Dude, I'm American.

<comment><USER22> Then you should know why it's not practical to run rails to every grocery store and dry cleaner in every town in the US.

I will never understand the obsession with fixed-rail transit on this site. It's interesting to observe, but it's never been satisfactorily explained. Is it just a matter of people never having been out of the Bay Area in their lives?

In an age where personal mobility is becoming more important rather than less, when costs associated with large-scale civic construction projects have skyrocketed and completion times have come to be measured in decades, and when networked fleets of self-driving cars are almost literally just around the corner, rail transit in the general case is about the dumbest thing ever. But I recognize that this is essentially a religious argument, and that you're equally certain you're right. Not much we can do but vote accordingly, I guess.

<comment><USER21> > Then you should know why it's not practical to run rails to every grocery > store and dry cleaner in every town in the US.

Then I know that track costs less to install and maintain than roads. If it isn't practical to run track, it isn't practical to run roads.

<comment><USER22> _Then I know that track costs less to install and maintain than roads. If it isn 't practical to run track, it isn't practical to run roads._

I don't see how that can be true in the general case. Around here, in the Seattle area, a recent 34-mile light rail installation cost about $368 million. Four-lane roads cost about $500K per mile these days, from what I can tell. (And yes, that seems unrealistically low by an order of magnitude -- I think the sources I Googled up are referring only to initial costs, or costs associated with building rural Interstates.)

Our next big rail project, ST3, will install 62 miles of rail over 20+ years at a cost of over $50 _billion._

Rail serves a tiny contingent of the population at enormous expense, effectively rooting them to the spot in the process. It has never really been shown to be effective at removing cars from the roads, certainly not in proportion to its price.

There has to be a better way. There may not be, right now, but there darned sure will be by the time the megaprojects we're considering today are complete and ready for service.

<comment><USER21> > Our next big rail project, ST3, will install 62 miles of rail over 20+ years > at a cost of over $50 billion.

Good basis for comparison. Because you see, for a typical freeway, a billion per mile is the cost.

And that's just installation.

Add in the cost to maintain the roads, and they lose to tracks hands down. Tracks don't need to be resurfaced. And track beds don't need a resurfacing just to get inspected.

(You're also missing the added cost for the overhead wiring if you're going to compare against electrified rail.

<comment><USER22> _Good basis for comparison. Because you see, for a typical freeway, a billion per mile is the cost._

Where do you get that? Obviously we got more than 500 miles of freeway for the $500B (inflation-adjusted) that the Eisenhower Interstate System cost us. We got about 50,000 miles, which works out to $10M/mile.

So something seems to have made both highway _and_ rail construction cost ludicrous amounts of money, if you're right about the $1B/mile figure. I don't think you are, though -- that amount is what I've heard cited for the most expensive mile of highway in the country, which supposedly is the stretch of I-90 that crosses Mercer Island. I'd have to throw a [Citation Needed] flag on the billion-dollar-per-mile figure, in the general case. If we're really spending that much on roads these days, somebody needs to figure out where all that money is going.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I envy mainland Europe with its rail system. I wish my region of Canada would build a rail system. What we have is old and mainly was for transporting ore, steel, grain. Even just regular rail not even high speed any speed is preferable in a snowstorm.

My region is small and would be perfect for a light rail system mainly because it's got few people scattered over a wide area with no direct route.

Bombardier even makes rail cars for many countries so it's a home-grown resource we could use.

I think south eastern Canada and north eastern US could have a great interconnected rail system. I'm only 800 km (~500 miles) from Boston but I may as well be on the dark side of the moon.

Like NY city before its subway system people were crowded in the city but when rail was expanded people could live in the suburbs and work in the city. I think a US and Canadian rail system would open up travel and trade on the eastern coasts of each country. Day trips to cities you'd never even think of visiting now or not even capable doing so now in a day.

<comment><USER24> The Anglosphere is just becoming a big joke altogether.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Rail is not cheap. It's feasible when we have population density. It would make sense along the DC-Boston megalopolis and perhaps SF-San Diego, maybe some stretch of Texas. It makes little sense in the rest of the country.

That said, where it would make sense, like DC-Boston, we definitely should build it out. Build up the cities as the countryside is absorbed (as seen in Japan, and elsewhere in Asia) and let it become viable. Its deployment would definitely affect how cities and other communities grow and also depopulate, so we'd need to anticipate that and prepare for it.

Three things China has going for is vis a vis the US:

-Pop density

-Command economy (gov't can just move things through with little debate, displace 1MM people, if necessary.)

-Costs (in labor, materials, regulation, etc.)

<comment><USER26> That's already a busy rail corridor. But guess what? It's falling apart.

Millions of people pass through the NYC rail terminals every year, and the big inter-city one is crippled by infrastructure failures and damaged tunnels that connect to NJ. It seems that the NJ government spent Federal $$ provided to fix it on something else.

We're living in an age of incompetence.

<comment><USER25> Acela is not really high-speed rail. They should build out bona-fide high- speed rail ala Shinkansen. New track, new rolling stock, new propulsion systems, and affordable fares. NYC-Boston should be half of what it is now and they should eliminate all the "classes". It should be simply utilitarian transport.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wonder if the USA will ever build and modernize its infrastructure? We're still coasting on what was built 50, 60, 70+ years ago.

Then you travel to the rest of the developed world, and wow, what a difference in infrastructure.

<comment><USER28> The US picked cargo over people for rail. The US has an amazing logistics system comprising of truck, rail, barge, and air. Some people are working on adding drones.

Not having passenger rail was a choice. Automated cars and the potential of Hyperloop might seriously change people's opinion of passenger rail.

<comment><USER24> Keep dreaming and buying into whatever fantasy rich people keep selling. Hyperloop isn't even a thing and neither are driverless cars. Even if we get fully automated cars the roads will stay congested.

<comment><USER28> I get the feeling driver-less cars are going to be a thing given all the money. I do wish we could have some standards for "annotating" the roads with useful beacons to help things along, but the money is probably going to talk. If driver-less cars appear, I do expect roads to flow a bit better just because of proper grouping and better coordinated exit / entrances.

Yes, the Hyperloop is pretty iffy, but at least it won't conflict with freight rail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Well, the fact that te government subsidized the automotive and oil industries with the Federal highway act in '56 lead to our deprioritization of rail. Had this not been the case, chances are we'd have European equivalent rail, and the small local trolley systems that dotted americas small and medium sized cities would never have been torn up.

<comment><USER30> No no, it's not billions spent on cars and suburbia, it's the size of the country!

<comment><USER31> Haha. You should try driving from Moscow to Vladivostok.

<comment><USER32> Most of that drive is actually ok - there are about 500km of unpaved road en route, and only three or so river fordings.

Managed it in a 1988 Merc 190E in eight days, so if that can do it, anything can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The US has a strong inter-city travel network in the airlines.

The TSA severely limits its effectiveness, so it could be tempting to build a rail network just to bypass the TSA, but there's no reason to think the same screening procedures won't apply to HSR after the first incident (or just threat).

<comment><USER34> This reminds me of the popularity boost various nosql databases got because it allowed devs to sidestep bureaucracy that had built up around schema changes.

<comment><USER35> That's the first useful justification I have ever seen for NoSQL.

How in the world did I miss such an obvious thing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Every time I hear or read something about the US I realize the country is in many ways far behind Europe. When it comes to healthcare (in terms of accessibility), education (in terms of cost), infrastructure, etc, America seems to be doing much worse than these countries. Yet, ironically, America still leads these countries (and the rest of the world) in most other spheres.

<comment><USER37> Keep in mind that in US all these services that us Europeans think are for the benefit for the society such as health care of education are actually just for the benefit of the private companies who rake in the money while the society foots the bill of these bad policies. But that's what you get when you have a goverment which is for the businesses instead of for the people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> We have a serious problem with retrogradism in this country.

A large number of people are suffering from changes outside of their control, and they are disconnected from those at the forefront of social and technological progress. Many of these people have lost trust in the system, and even in progress itself (outside of progressions that are accessible and affordable such as games or phones). As a result, there is little enthusiasm for investing in major improvements to systems or building any major infrastructure enabling progress.

"High speed rail? What is in it for me? I work part time and can't afford these medications. I want the life I used to have back."

Perhaps a good place to start is understanding the experience of people who are voting for an imagined retrograde society. This can be difficult for those of us who have had the privilege of a better education, or better opportunities in the cities, or even all of our needs met as we build what we build. The privileged must try, and must succeed in understanding what is happening here. This is because the votes of those within what is essentially a ghetto lead to major consequences, including underfunding high speed rail. The result isn't just ridiculously under-qualified and intellectually isolated politicians that are easy to make fun of.

The underprivileged will keep voting in this way until their concerns are answered (or not).

We at the technological forefront know more about what needs to be done in terms of advancing progress, possibly even to the point of solving half of all social problems. However, we must also pay heed to the immediate, harsh reality of the people left behind. Our environment -- natural, political, or infrastructural -- depends on this.

If the ethical demand to listen and react appropriately to the suffering of others does not convince us to strongly act, watching the destructive results of their votes should.

<comment><USER39> I would not have much interest in greater understanding between me and someone who calls my desires "retrograde".

<comment><USER38> That is assuming the term retrograde is a bad thing; often it is not. I might have chosen a better word, and am curious if there is one.

This retrograde notion is based on a lot of evidence and personal experiences. For example, in a conversation I had with someone a few years ago I asked what is wrong with the way things are. That person told me he wants things to be like the way they were in the 1950s, referring to the sense of community, job opportunities, and social mores.

<comment><USER40> Sounds to me like those people miss Jim Crow and the advantages of a society built on the persecution and hate of others. Retrograde with all its negative connotations doesn't even begin to be negative enough for the situation you're describing. Yes, you could have chosen a better word but you're looking in the wrong direction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> May be the US is doing a wiser thing. I live in Spain, where high speed train was pushed in the era of the housing bubble, and in my opinion is not that big deal, except for communicating the two bigger cities of Spain (Madrid and Barcelona). Lower capacity routes are on deficit, and I'm very skeptical about their long term viability.

</comment><comment><USER42> There is another question here. How the hell did the French build 300km of high speed track, going through _central Paris_ , for only 10 billion dollars? If Australia could do that, the cost benefit analysis on Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane would look very different.

Melbourne to Sydney is worth doing now, though it's a close thing. But the benefits come as time savings for rich businessmen, and Australia told them that if they really wanted it they could pay for it themselves.

<comment><USER43> They really need to build high speed rail across the east coast of Australia. We've talked about it in this country for so long and yet nothing is happening.

<comment><USER42> The problem is that it will cost 100 billion dollars (!), and it really isn't clear that it's worth that much. That's where the French seem to have some magical advantage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightline](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightline) appears to be for real in Florida and the Acela now carries a majority of traffic on some parts of the Boston-NY corridor and service to Washington. Texas has much cheaper gas and stronger car culture than anywhere in Europe or Canada. It's really just California that's lagging behind expectations; the other two projects could be better. And Florida / Texas / California / Northeast wraps up all of the locations in the US that are viable for high- speed intercity passenger rail. The only truly underserved corridor in North America is Toronto - Detroit/Windsor - Chicago, but most people don't even recognize it as a possibility because it crosses a border.

So instead of "what's wrong with the US" we should ask "what went wrong with CA HSR?".

</comment><comment><USER45> You can't even compare the population density of France with Germany, hence why always apply the "high speed rail" idea to the US? Image a high speed rail system between large cities but people still have to own and use a car, drive 200miles to/from the next station. Also either the train stops at every small town or it will be an express train that leaves the rural areas behind.

IMHO a high speed railway network is not the start but an evolution of an existing regional rail system/public transportation system that acts as a feeder and communter infrastructure.

The US lacks those public transpotation systems even in mid-size towns. That's a bigger problem IMHO.

</comment><comment> d--b Something that is never debated when we talk about high speed train in the us: would it bring development the same way the iron horse brought development in the 19th century?

I mean, yes the US is sparsely populated (in the middle), but isn't it also because it doesn't have fast and easy transport system?

Wouldn't a high speed line between San Fran and Portland develop the very rural regions of Northern California?

High speed train also means high speed cargo transport, isn't that driving some economical development?

These are not rhetorical questions, i seriously have no idea of the answers, but it would be nice to see what experts think about that.

</comment><comment><USER46> Even third world countries such as Morocco are building rail tracks for bullet trains...

</comment><comment><USER47> A big difference between europe and us is also in the fact that people in europe tend to live inside the cities, and not just go there to work. Train is considered faster than plane her in france, because you can go to the trainstation using subway, and board immediately, whereas you need to leave your place 2 hours before your flight.

i have the feeling that this advantage would be lost in the us, where people live in suburbs way more, and so any trip starts at least with a 45 minutes drive ( not to mention the fact that parking in an airport is probably more convenient than in a city center).

<comment><USER48> 62.7% of the US population lives in only 3.5% of the land mass. We're not as concentrated in cities as Europe, but we're not all small towners by far. And we're seeing a mass migration to city centers across the country, while rural areas are seeing a depopulation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> 'Why Trains Suck in America' : [https://youtu.be/mbEfzuCLoAQ](https://youtu.be/mbEfzuCLoAQ)

</comment><comment><USER50> _In the U.S., President Obama's initiative was met by Republican governors elected in 2010 who, for reasons that had little to do with sanity, resisted free federal money to fund the completion of intercity rail projects their (Democratic) predecessors had developed_

It's not insane. Federal money is never "free" it's taken from the people and always comes with strings attached.

<comment><USER51> In addition, if the rail project might potentially have a negative operating profit, then it may be rational to refuse it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> When other countries play a bigger role in securing the global economy with military might, maybe we can start building a high speed rail infrastructure. Otherwise, I don't see an actual need for it. It would be an improvement, for sure, but all I see is people looking at much smaller countries and assuming that America is stupid for not doing everything they do.

</comment><comment><USER53> I still resent Rick Scott's decision to reject federal funds for Florida's high speed rail. It would have been the first high speed rail in the country.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_High_Speed_Corridor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_High_Speed_Corridor)

</comment><comment><USER40> I think it's too late for rail. Yes, we lost a generation of development in rail. We also lost a generation of development for pretty much every other transportation industry, and thus our whole infrastructure. The article briefly touches on it. Transportation in general hasn't been a priority for at least thirty years. I'm not worried about rail. Rail is dead in the US and has been for a long time. I'm worried about our highways. That's our infrastructure core, without which the US cannot survive. Not building rail projects in the US is pretty normal and on par for the downward trajectory we're on.

Not building and maintaining highways and bridges shouldn't even be an option. While some upper-class, rich people can afford to live in our cities, they are a huge minority and most people rely on cars and highways. Outside of a couple of cities, good city public transportation simply doesn't exist in the US and won't exist anytime soon.

I think we need to be realistic as to what is possible in the US. High speed inter-city rail isn't possible. And even if it is, can it compete with the price of plane tickets? Doubtful. Giving our cities good public transportation isn't possible. It may have been possible in the past, but not the last few decades. Having room inside a city for all who want to live there most certainly isn't possible. Building roads and bridges has now become almost impossible in many places. I have to wonder what is the plan for the US transportation infrastructure. As far as I can see, the plan is to let it deteriorate until it doesn't exist anymore. At least in that sense, it's consistent with education, social programs, and the rest of our crumbling society.

<comment><USER54> It's possible. We just don't wanna.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> From the little data I gathered, trains/mass transit seems to be much more efficient than cars regarding greenhouse emissions. YMMV depending on your stance on climate change, but I find it sad people dismissing rails so easily in this thread.

</comment><comment><USER56> Interestingly a private company is tying to build a high speed train from Dallas to Houston tx. The great thing is that it would be privately owned so if it's a flop taxpayers arent on the hook.

</comment><comment><USER57> so because every other country is subsidizing the shit out of stuff so should we? Economics drives our country not pipe dreams of people who want to get the taxpayers to foot the bill for their new hotness

</comment><comment><USER58> Rail is a bad idea wrapped in shiny engineering. Read Randal O'Toole [http://ti.org/antiplanner/](http://ti.org/antiplanner/).

</comment><comment><USER59> IMO electric and self-driving car technology is advancing rapidly enough that investment in high-speed rail is going to end up like landline telephones -- it had a time when it was useful, but countries that missed the boat will end up doing A-OK without them.

Rail is convenient, but it will never ever be as convenient as having a car take you where you want to be, carry your kids, and carry your stuff around. As soon as self-driving technology eliminates the hassles of parking and clean solar-electric tech eliminates the environmental concerns, ridership is going to tank on all the fixed train lines. It might be 10-15 years out, but I would be shocked if any of the investments made today in rail ever pay off.

<comment><USER60> A self-driving car with 1-2 passengers takes up significantly more space than existing public transportation technologies, such as trains and buses. This isn't a problem outside of densely populated places. However, as the density of a place increases, point-to-point transportation become increasingly ineffective.

Replacing public transportation with point-to-point self-driving technology in a place like Manhattan, would require building out a ridiculously massive amount of road capacity.

<comment><USER3> You're thinking like an engineer, where efficieny trumps all.

In the real world people who can will spend money not to be packed in like sardines with people of questionable hygiene.

Know what happens when the AC is out on your vehicle? You get it fixed.

How about when the AC is out for the 3rd time this month on the bus/train?

"Oh well, that sucks, guess I'm going into work sweaty today"

Mass transit everywhere I've been in the US sucks. It's so bad only the poor us it, because even the middle-middle class finds it disgusting/inconvenient.

<comment><USER61> In Hawaii, the city bus system isn't disgusting. Someone I know told me so. But yeah everywhere else in US, public transportation is disgusting and inconvenient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Even if we had high-speed rail the gov would regulate it to death like everything else - they'll make it just as painful as flying. Imagine the TSA salivating for the mission creep.

</comment><comment><USER63> Several comments in this thread almost appear to be constructed to prove the author right in how the debate derails. It's not much of my concern, but still I couldn't help to notice something that felt like an unusual occurrence here on HN, or maybe I'm simply seeing ghosts. I am rather tired to be honest!

Anyway, my flawed observation:

Some sort of deadlock where instead of discussing how to improve the situation, the discourse get stuck in debating which is the correct reason for not doing anything, instead of trying to come up with improvements?

Several times arguments are made that a non existent technology will make current investment pointless in the future, so no investment should be made now. Isn't that the argument implied by the title of the article?

Obviously, it could be true that future inventions would make it pointless, but that certainly is not something you can calculate/know off the cuff, if it's even worth speculating about. Building a high speed rail network take long enough time that all those possible avenues can probably be explored in excruciating detail before the first shovel hits the dirt a decade from now if everything moves quickly.

People are sceptical towards hyperloop, which is understandable in many ways. But what if it would work? Wouldn't it be worth investing quite a lot of money simply to figure out if it could work?

Obviously it could potentially only solve a very specific part of the transportation puzzle, but one that could have quite some positive effects.

Positioning cars and aircraft as more-or-less the only viable ways of communication for the foreseeable future sounds like an awfully odd position to me, even for a very sparsely populated country. While, the correct solution might not be high-speed rail, some variation of it it could still be the best solution in several instances.

Maybe someone would come up with something like a tethered electrical ground effect aircraft/train which could take advantage of the sparse population if they knew there were money to be made. Instead of massive resistance and cartloads of red tape ?

</comment><comment><USER64> A guess: Now that Trump is talking about "infrastructure", the passenger train people are coming out of the woodwork again looking for big subsidies from the US Federal Government.

Some years ago, for a while I was a prof in Ohio. Well, there was a group all hot on connecting all the Rust Belt cities -- Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Cincinnati, Muncie, Akron, Indianapolis, South Bend, Youngstown, Toledo, etc. with passenger trains. They were really hot.

Look, guys, the US had a very good passenger rail network. Could go by train from one tiny crossroads to any other, all by train. And people did that. But soon that whole thing was killed off by, and may I have have the envelope please? Right, the Model T, etc. Private cars. A lot of the tracks grew up with weeds.

After WWII, soon, for trips up to 1000 miles, say with the whole family, people would rather just take the family car. Just after WWII, the passenger trains were still running, but, no thanks, people would rather take the family car, e.g., from Florida all the way to Grandma's near Buffalo, NY. As soon as I got married, my wife and I went to her family farm for Christmas, 900 miles, by car, car packed with stuff. Plane? Train? Bus? No thanks.

Gee, guys, now with the TSA, no way will I want to take a car full of luggage, toys, Christmas presents, etc. past the TSA. No way.

For me, for anything like family travel, public mass transportation, no matter how fast, how roomy, how cheap, how safe, due to the TSA and all the luggage handling problems, lack of privacy, being legally under the thumb of a lot of people, rules, bureaucrats, various cases of police, being subject to being forced to wait in my seat for four hours while whatever is going on, etc., the answer is no, no way, never, don't bother to ask again.

There are a lot of people and projects there in the woodwork eager to come out with lots of publicity, reasons, and excuses and eager to scarf up Federal subsidies. A LOT of people/projects. Clearly there is a whole industry of this stuff. They are always back in the woodwork, and as soon as they smell money, and they are good at smelling money, out they come, big publicity drives, etc.

</comment><comment><USER51> High speed rail doesn't actually provide the eco-benefits over planes that proponents think it will. And high speed rail is only competitive against planes and cars at distances less than 500mi. Unfortunately the US is too sparsely populated and the big cities outside of the coastal corridors are too spread out for high speed rail to be economically and ecologically sensible. [http://www.newsweek.com/why-high-speed-trains-dont-make- sens...](http://www.newsweek.com/why-high-speed-trains-dont-make-sense-74107)

</comment><comment><USER65> What's the justification for spending on high speed rail vs roads vs air travel vs doing nothing (Google Car is coming, remember)?

<comment><USER66> Will the Google Car drive at 200 mph ?

<comment><USER67> No, but it will take you door to door, departing instantly when you're ready and not before, and it won't stop in between unless you want it to.

<comment><USER5> *citation needed

The congested road network still happens with Google cars.

<comment><USER65> Does it, even when cars movements are coordinated and all driving automated? How congested?

Regardless I would want to see a cost-justification of high speed rail vs auto vs standard train vs buses, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> How much money does Amtrak in the US Northeast Corridor make each year, in ballpark, round numbers? $100 million? $1 million? $1?

</comment><comment><USER37> For americans a train is socialism. They need their V8s for crawling walking speed on the 4 lane highway burning a ton of fossil fuels. Actually the bigger the truck the better since it means freedom (or something). ;-)

<comment><USER68> Go walk up to someone in LA or Seattle and ask them if they could would they take a train into work instead if it cut the time in traffic down. I'll bet very few people would say no.

<comment><USER69> Trains in LA have done well (buses not so much). This is despite the trains being crowded and not quite as on-time as they ought to be.

405 and 10 are a living hell; plenty of folks inching along them would rather not be.

[http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-ca-cm- building-...](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-ca-cm-building- type-expo-line-20170521-story.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> The first one went OK, the second collapsed the Japanese rail industry. All require huge subsidies.

America is smart!

</comment><comment><USER71> This sounds like a title written by someone that's never visited anywhere but New York or LA. The USA is very large, and we don't have high population density except for the Eastern seaboard (where rail seems to work pretty well there).

Roads are a much better, cheaper, faster, flexible option. We just need a 10x revolution in: storage density, fast charging, or efficiency.

</comment><comment><USER72> I'm going to share my experience with commuter (not high‐speed) rail: the New Mexico Rail Runner. [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trainroadrunner.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trainroadrunner.jpg)

The Rail Runner was built in 2006 primarily due to Governor Bill Richardson's efforts. It essentially covers two cities, Albuquerque (~500,000 people) and Santa Fe (the capital, ~70,000 people), which are already connected by Interstate 25.

I love trains; I recently took Amtrak to LA and back. And I love the Rail Runner. It's my favorite way to get to Santa Fe by far. Once I arrive, being without a car is not too bad: Santa Fe is a fairly walkable city, Albuquerque has a decent bus system, and a bicycle (which I can take on the train) makes things a lot easier.

The big problem with the Rail Runner is its cost.

Richardson originally was very vague about the cost, and initial estimates were (it turns out, a wildly optimistic) sub–$100 million in initial capital. The state took out a loan to pay for construction. The total cost is now estimated to be about $800 million. Currently the state Department of Transportation pays about $25 million a year on the loan; as currently structured, that will slowly increase to $35 million per year until 2025 and 2026, where the payments jump to $110 million (per year!).

New Mexico is currently in a budget crisis (not just due to the Rail Runner). ([http://fortune.com/2016/12/04/new-medico-budget- crisis/](http://fortune.com/2016/12/04/new-medico-budget-crisis/)) There have been special legislative sessions called this year to sort things out, and there's conflict between all three branches of our state government. I have no idea where the DOT will find $80 million in their budget the next ten years, at least not without serious cuts to our already underfunded highways.

Then there are the operating costs. This is "not so bad." Revenues only cover about 10% of operating expenses. But at least the rest is covered (at the moment) by county taxes, federal grants, and payments for use of the track by Amtrak and BNSF.

I'll be cynical: my personal belief is that Richardson intentionally hid the costs and pushed the Rail Runner as a short‐term publicity stunt for his 2008 Presidential run, without a care as to what it would do to the state ten years later. It is very like him. (Don't even get me started on the spaceport.) [https://www.abqjournal.com/news/state/602848nm10-16-07.htm](https://www.abqjournal.com/news/state/602848nm10-16-07.htm)

The legislature sponsored a study to determine the feasibility of selling the Rail Runner ([https://lintvkrqe.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/final- hm-127-s...](https://lintvkrqe.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/final-hm-127-study- final-report-november-4-2015.pdf)). It concluded that nobody would be willing to buy it due to low revenues, high operating costs, and the plethora of exclusivity agreements that would need to be renegotiated (with BNSF, Amtrak, the pueblos, the federal Department of Transportation…). And selling it wouldn't help since it wouldn't absolve us of the requirement to pay off the debt. At this point I don't foresee a solution other than refinancing the loan (again) to avoid those $100 million cliff payments, at the cost of further interest payments.

Like I said, I love the Rail Runner, and I really want to see it (or passenger rail of some sort) succeed in New Mexico. I do think the way the Rail Runner was handled — intentionally hiding the costs and having no concrete plan to cover operating costs — is completely unconscionable.

Not that it has to operate at a profit; after all, highways lose money too. But the Rail Runner loses _so much_ money, and we're already a poor state. It is valuable to connect New Mexico's capital with its largest city. I just feel like there has to have been a better way to do it. I hope the proposed train from Las Cruces, NM to El Paso, TX ([http://www.lcsun- news.com/story/news/local/2017/06/28/study-...](http://www.lcsun- news.com/story/news/local/2017/06/28/study-proposed-rail-service-las-cruces- el-paso-would-cost-120-m-430-m/436728001/)) will learn from the mistakes made with the Rail Runner.

Whew. After all that, I'm curious: what _successful_ rail projects have you seen, and what makes them successful?

<comment><USER73> Most rail systems do lose money, but this one sounds pretty bad planning.

The population of the cities being connected is extremely low, and prices are ridiculously cheap too (2 to 10 dollars?).

100 million was wildly optimistic, French-style light rail was really expensive too, about 600 million per mile - [http://www.citymetric.com/transport/rer-or-rer-c-how- paris-t...](http://www.citymetric.com/transport/rer-or-rer-c-how-paris- typifies-two-models-cross-city-commuter-train-lines-2704)

The cheapest I can find on Ferropedia for a similar project would be 600 million dollars, so 800 million isn't way over budget. And the fare is 20 euros (more than twice the most expensive fare for the Road Runner).

[http://www.ferropedia.es/wiki/Costos_de_construcci%C3%B3n_de...](http://www.ferropedia.es/wiki/Costos_de_construcci%C3%B3n_de_infraestructura#Costes_de_algunos_corredores_espa.C3.B1oles)

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> What about the logistics industry?

</comment><comment><USER75> People keep on forgetting the immense size of the continental USA.

[http://francistapon.com/images/travels/europe/usa/900/TEXAS....](http://francistapon.com/images/travels/europe/usa/900/TEXAS.jpg)

<comment><USER76> People keep on forgetting the immense density of America across it's East Coast: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis)

The northeast corridor accounts for 60M(!) people in the United States and yet the rail options are expensive and slow. it still boggles my mind that flying from Boston to NYC was cheaper by flight than train.

While the US is geographically immense, the population is actually concentrated pretty well. Obviously rail doesn't work everywhere but if we had rails serving the Northeast Corridor, Texas (Austin, Dallas, Houston), California Coast (San Diego -> SF) we would have lines serving highly trafficked and dense areas.

<comment><USER77> That train's as expensive as it is because 54% of people doing rail-or-fly trips between Boston and NYC take the train. It's value pricing.</comment></comment></comment>


Help a german hacker plan a road trip on the east coast via github - <AUTHOR> http://bitboxer.github.com/eastcoast/

<comment><AUTHOR> Please help me in making my road trip on the east coast a great trip. If you know some things I have to do, please send me an email or fork the repo!

Thanks!</comment>


A Computer Repair Shop as a Startup (with numbers) - <AUTHOR> http://pcrepairs.posterous.com/my-computer-repair-shop-numbers

<comment><USER3> I've toyed with this idea for years. Maybe that's the case with others as well. I've got a load of tech savvy friends, rent is very affordable for storefront commercial buildings. I could even scrounge up some initial investment money. But it can't be that easy... can it?

I was sad to see this was the only post on the blog. I'd be very interested in knowing what steps went into setting up shop.

<comment><AUTHOR> I plan on posting more in the coming days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I, too, own a computer repair shop. We've been open for a few years now, and while I don't have any numbers on me at the moment, this seems very similar to our early days. We're in a very small town, so our numbers probably started off a bit lower.

We do a lot of: virus/spyware removal, replacing broken power jacks on laptops, hard drive replacement (with and without data recovery), in the spring/summer we replace a lot of power supplies thanks to all of the thunderstorms), format and reinstall (usually at their request, we rarely have to do it due to viruses, etc.), RAM upgrades, laptop screen replacements.

By far, the majority of the hardware problems we see are hard drives and laptop power jacks, which makes sense, since they tend to take the most abuse.

</comment><comment><USER5> My first "computer job" (early in high school) started as gopher duty at a local PC shop in my hometown. I unpacked boxes of hard drives, swept the floors, and occasionally cleaned the bathroom (aside: every high school kid's first job should involve cleaning a toilet!). Eventually, I moved up to doing diagnostic and assembly work, and the owner realized that he could hire high school kids to do most of the tech jobs. The guy is still in business nearly twenty years later, and as far as I can tell, he's done quite well for himself.

The only problem is, it's not the most intellectually stimulating work in the world, and it's certainly not for the high-aspiration type of person. But when you can hire smart high school kids to do most of the labor, set up some basic process automation and establish a reliable network of customer recommendations, it takes very little effort or time to maintain the business. I'm sure I work longer hours in the bit-mines than he ever did.

</comment><comment><USER6> > Most of my revenue has been been from virus and malware removal. I coupled > the virus/malware removal with an antivirus installation service for $19 and > most people gladly paid it.

Once a computer has become infected, it's fairly impossible to determine if the infection has been completely eradicated.[1] I wonder that that $19 buys you. A few executions of anti-malware software until they claim "Clean"?

[1] I realize that even in the absence of a known infection it's "impossible" to know whether you're infected.

<comment><USER7> What I would expect:

* fewer crappy apps running on startup

* improved startup time

* no unknown apps running after a clean boot

(Previous 3 can be monitored with e.g. SysInternals AutoRuns)

* no browser / networking stack hijacking extensions showing popups / interstitials / DOM modifications etc. at random intervals

(As evidenced by e.g. HijackThis)

* no unsigned DLLs / drivers of unknown provenance loaded in any process or the kernel

(As evidenced by e.g. Process Explorer's Verify Image Signatures option - <USER2> in loaded modules of the "System" process to see all loaded kernel drivers and modules), with a representative sample of applications running (browsers, productivity, etc.)

* no apparent rootkit-style hijacking of the process / registry / disk inspection routines, as would be shown by e.g. RootkitRevealer

And of course, a commercial virus scan, for what it's worth. I personally don't run a real-time virus scanner; I rely on monitoring what the system is doing directly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> PC shops like this one are the market for our premium product and it is extremely interesting to see these numbers. It wasn't obvious to me before (I'm sort of slow with these things) but if you're selling a B2B product, checking out a customer's books is really enlightening.

<comment><AUTHOR> What's your premium product?

<comment><USER8> My co-founder and I make Ninite (YC W08) <http://ninite.com>

It automatically installs apps for windows fast. It's free for home use, but we charge businesses. Many of our subscribers are PC shops like yours.

It's fascinating to see the next step up the value chain in such detail. Thanks for writing that post.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome product; I'll look into it.

I think it would be great for custom PCs and of course for newly formatted PCs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What do you do with customers who don't have or can't find product keys for Windows, Office, etc.? I find the majority of people who ask me for help fall into this category. Unless they have a laptop with the product key stuck underneath, they rarely can find their original product keys. I'm then faced with telling them they need to shell out hundreds of dollars or switch to Linux. Some of the them switched, but unless they're willing to learn Linux, that's a whole new set of problems (e.g. they call you saying "I downloaded MSN but I can't install for some reason").

<comment><USER4> For Windows, you tell them they need to order recovery CD/DVDs from the manufacturer, and then we order them for them. It's usally between $15-25. If we happen to have restore disks from their manufacturer that will work with their model, we use them, so long as the computer had a valid copy of windows on it to begin with.

If it's a computer they've built rather than bought from a big box and have lost their key, well, they're out of luck, but most people who build their own computers don't bring them to a computer repair shop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What do you guys think about doing this part time and on-site at people's homes? I'm looking for something to cover my basic expenses while working on another project. Yeah, I could get a full-time job. But I would rather have the time considering my expenses are very low right now.

One big benefit for me is that it would get me outside and dealing with people to counter my extended hacking sessions. Any ideas on a good rate and marketing strategy?

<comment><USER11> I did this through college, really was stressful compared to almost any other part time job. Paid better though.

It's very hard to be empathetic and be in the business, you end up undercharging but still going too far above and beyond to meet their schedules/needs, and ultimately feeling bad you didn't do a 100% perfect job after you give them the bill (because in hindsight, you could do any job in half the time)

Oh and you'll get calls 2 years after you close up shop.

<comment><USER10> Thanks. I think being empathetic might be a bit of a problem for me but the great thing is that I can always just stop doing it whenever I want. Is this where the stress came?

Any ideas on a good rate to charge? Do people look at on-site work as a premium service or do they look at you as the small guy and expect a really good rate?

How did you market your service?

I'd really like to hear more about your experience as the getting out the door aspect is really appealing to me right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What are your rates? Hourly or per Job? How much do you pay for overhead (rent, etc).

You state that they bring their systems to you so I assume you have a storefront.

Those numbers are impressive for just starting out, but it would be nice to know the full story such as your expenses regarding the running and the upkeep of the business.

</comment><comment><USER13> I can't get by this guy's prose. Something just seems off about it. Maybe I shouldn't be cruising HN this... late.

It always seems like anyone qualified enough to fix a computer could make way more per hour doing programming or IT work. Computer repair seems like a great idea but I don't think it's efficient right now.

<comment><USER14> Possibly, but someone qualified enough to be a good programmer could probably also make way more in a financial or medical field. Having the _ability_ doesn't necessarily correlate to having an _interest_. Many smart people may choose to repair computers because of the interaction with a variety of people daily rather than stuck in a cubicle somewhere.

Hell, I could make more money as a dentist, but I don't find the idea of poking around in people's mouths every day to be very appealing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> my personal definition of a 'startup' is a business that aims to grow rapidly, acquire venture funding, and hire more employees. this seems like a (successful) small business, not a 'tech startup'. the author's hope is not to become the next 37signals, meebo, facebook, google, etc.

<comment><USER16> That makes "startup" sound like a kind of disreputable thing. What's wrong with building a sustainable business that you enjoy running, and continuing to run it, instead of looking for the quickest way to sell out?

<comment><USER15> out of curiosity, what part of my comment made it sound like aiming to grow rapidly to scale was disreputable? i don't mean to pass value judgments on either small businesses or growth-oriented startups

<comment><USER16> That was my editorializing, not read into yours, sorry. My view is that "startup" is a pretty broad category, that's mainly based on someone who has an idea they think is interesting or will be useful to someone (possibly a large group, or possibly a small group). There's a certain subset of those people who are mainly in it for the money: they want to get big and sell out quick. If those are the _only_ kind who really count as startups, then I'd have to take a pretty negative view of startups...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It does not matter if he considers himself a startup or not.

Think about it. He does fairly well doing what he does. Must a dentist "scale", or is the dentist perfectly happy running her practice until she retires?

Why do people have to scale? Wouldn't you like yourself to earn that regular money every month doing something that you like without thinking of constant expansion?

<comment><USER18> I've heard, from assorted friends an d such, that one of "the problems with capitalism" is that businesses must grow or die.

I never quite got that. I mean, I understand that a business may be driven by shareholders to just keep going after that one extra dollar, but it's also quite feasible to have a sustainable business that earns its owners a good income, isn't always trying to grow, and leaves everyone happy.</comment></comment>


A. Stepanov on the STL - <AUTHOR> http://www.antiquark.com/escape/public_html/stepanovusa.html

<comment><USER3> He has a book now, Elements of Programming: <http://www.amazon.com/dp/032163537X/>

</comment><comment><USER4> Boy, that's old.

> _Java is a very new language_

:-)

</comment><comment><USER5> "As the chief proponent of Java at SGI told me: 'Alex, you have to go where the money is.' But I do not particularly want to go where the money is - <USER2> usually does not smell nice there."

I really love this quote

</comment><comment><USER6> T max<T>(Comparable a, Comparable b) { if (a.compareTo(b) < 0) { return a; } else { return b; } }

Or something..

Explicitly specifying that a and b needs to be comparable instead of shooting an endless template error message.

And: "My approach works, theirs does not work." explains perfecly why C++ is what it is.

<comment><USER7> Is that similar to this Haskell code?

        max :: Ord a => a -> a -> a
        max a b = if a > b then a else b

The concepts that Stepanov was talking about, where algorithms are defined for classes of data structures supporting certain operations (iteration, comparison, etc.), sounds very familiar to anyone who's familiar with Haskell's type classes.

<comment><USER8> That Haskell code, as I understand it, will dynamically dispatch the call to max through the Ord typeclass dictionary passed at runtime. The C++ code will statically choose the appropriate function.

<comment><USER9> I'm pretty sure that Haskell typeclasses are also resolved at compile time. That's why you can't have a list containing different ordered types, for example (unless they can all be coerced to the same type).

<comment><USER8> No, you can't have a list containing different ordered types because the signature for comparison only permits two values of the same exact type, not any arbitrary member of class `Ord`.

As I said before, Haskell passes [runtime dictionaries](<http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/OOP_vs_type_classes>). The compiler can perhaps infer many cases statically, but the core implementation is to pass around runtime dictionaries for typeclasses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Stepanov is a really smart guy, but I find his arguments that OOP methodology is "wrong" or somehow is no good, doesn't hold water. The truth is that a lot of the world is build on at least some OOP principles and that they have worked for countless designs, and been included into languages by lots of other really smart people.

It also seems like this interview was done quite some time ago (see his comments about generics in Java) but I can't find a date.

Nevertheless, a very interesting interview.

<comment><USER11> I think you are misrepresenting him.

He says his paradigm is "start with the algorithm" (to make it generic) and _that_ does not work in the OO model, and as an example he gives a simple max(a, b) function which he wouldn't know how to write in Java.

The "OOP principles" adopted by others, which you think voids his argument, you can argue are also used by Stepanov himself. He just calls it data abstraction (iirc).

<comment><USER12> His argument actually seems to point to dynamically-typed functional programming, which is not surprising, considering his work with Scheme.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: CheckUp – Social network suicide prevention in Go - <AUTHOR> http://www.CheckUpApp.org <comment><USER2> I can understand why you think this might be a good idea. But it completely doesn't take the depressed person into account at all. It thinks it can solve suicide by checking up on the individual? Do you think the individual wants to be checked up on? Maybe the people checking up on the person are the actual problem in that person's life, which could create an even more serious dilemma for that person.

If there is anything that would drive me to suicide, it would be more people thinking that they can 'solve the problem' in this manner.

<comment><USER3> That's an interesting perspective. I disagree. I think if someone is tweeting about suicidal intentions then it follows that they are not concerned about the privacy of those intentions.

<comment><USER2> Many people don't understand the terms and conditions of social networks like twitter and facebook, and privacy with those services is ambiguous and difficult to manage.

If a person is feeling suicidal because the people in their life are not noticing their pain, I really doubt that knowing an algorithm had to do it will make them feel any better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This seems a little accidentally sinister to me... Something about doing automatic sentiment analysis on someone's data without their permission seems morally questionable. I mean, almost none of us are happy when the government does it, even though it's allegedly with the (very questionably) "good" intention of "fighting (terrorism|drugs|bogeymen)".

<comment><USER5> It's different when it's public data, though - it's data _willingly shared_.

<comment><USER2> It's not willingly shared to you

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ricky,

Thanks for this service.

Sometimes, all it takes is to remind someone that people are there for them, and care about them. I don't terribly like Twitter, but I try to read it once a day or so just to keep a view on how people are doing; this service would be incredibly useful to me to make sure that I don't have things that I'd like to pay attention to falling through the cracks.

I know a bunch of people here seem to wish that the service were less aggressive (or that it didn't exist at all): for my application, I'd almost prefer it be more aggressive! Three negative sentiments is a high bar to meet, and I fear the false negative rate could be quite high.

Anyway, thanks very much for writing this. As a whole, classes of applications that help me mediate my interaction with social networks are things that I support, and in specific, this application is incredibly valuable to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you like it! Thanks for kind words.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Have you thought at all about the ethics of meddling in people's lives? [1]

This "service" seems contrary to basic notions of privacy and freedom.

[1] [http://www.davidhume.org/texts/suis.html](http://www.davidhume.org/texts/suis.html)

<comment><USER6> The only thing the service does is alert the friends of someone who appears to be about to end their own life, but who, for some reason, is posting about it on a public forum.

I can assure you that the service does no meddling whatsoever.

Someone who is swept by the depths of depression, and takes a last moment to emerge long enough to ask their friends for help -- well, I think that it is only fair to counterbalance the feed algorithms that try to keep the rest of us blissfully ignorant, and let them have the support that they ask for.

<comment><USER7> > alert the friends of someone who appears

That's meddling all right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think this is really cool. Clarifying question from these two statements that seem to conflict:

> The goal of the CheckUp project is to detect any serious sign of depression, > self-harm or suicide posted to a social network and provide peer support by > notifying a concerned party.

> The app works by checking the tweets on your home timeline every few minutes > and sending you an email notification if a tweet is flagged.

Shouldn't it instead make the person signing up the "concerned party" to be notified via e-mail, and instead have that concerned party specify which twitter feeds to watch? I'm probably missing something here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey thanks for the feedback! I will try to update the site to clarify the language a little more –– what you described actually is how it works. The user that signs up is the concerned party that we would notify. The app watches all tweets on that user's home timeline. By "home timeline", I was referring to all tweets posted by the user and everyone followed by that users (so, your Twitter feed). That's how it's described in Twitter's API docs, but I can see where that may be a point of confusion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This looks like a useful tool.

Assuming for the moment that this is very accurate.

What then?

Ann discovers that Bob is suicidal. What is Ann supposed to do then? (My suggestions are to ask Bob if he intends to die; and to help Bob access medical help. (Emergency help if he says he intends to die soon)).

Perhaps some set of accurate, international, flowcharts showing what you're supposed to do if a colleague / friend / relative / etc is suicidal would help. (In UK: Contact their GP; or an ambulance if suicide is in progress;)

You also seem to be ignoring ages, which is tricky. What do your ethics team say about reporting suicidality and people under 18?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea on the flow chart! Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> hum, interesting.

Kind of minority report here.

Machine learning on depression syndrome ?

I'am a hacker and not truly white, are you not afraid that people used this to take advantage of depressed people ?

A man can use this to spot depressed women , some are manipulator born people.

I find the project interesting but it have a lot of ethic problems. I think that it will be more a tools for the people in wealth.

maybe it could be more interesting to have the global mood of people than the mood of one people.

<comment><USER11> ML would be a huge step forward, this just matches a couple keywords.

<comment><USER10> if you need some advice on ML i will be glad to give you some.

I'am mainly use python for this but there's other solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How accurate do you think this can be? What happens if I write a facebook update that says, as an example:

I don't believe I have ever said "I feel depressed"

Would this be flagged? Does it only take one post to be flagged or is it looking for recurring behaviour?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question. Part of the ongoing nature of this project is to expand our phrase detections. I pulled the original phrase list from a white paper written by BYU last year because I figured that would be a good starting point. There is room for vast improvement though.

If the last few posts leading up to the flagged post are classified as predominately negative (currently looking at the last 3 tweets before the flagged tweet), then we send the notification. The intuition is that if a person is comfortable enough with social to post seriously suicidal content, he or she has probably already made some preceding negative remarks.

<comment><USER12> Very interesting. Thanks for the response!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This sounds like a great service but I really don't give a damn that it is written in Go.

Also:

> _This application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again > later._

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey! Thanks for the heads up. We picked up more traction than I had anticipated, but we should be back online now! And some people may be interested in the Go repo ;)</comment></comment>


New year's resolution for product managers: 8 books to read in 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/Design/comments/2rik1z/new_years_resolution_for_product_managers_8_books/

<comment><USER2> Link to actual article that was posted on Reddit:

[http://alpha-ux.co/new-years-resolution-product- managers-8-b...](http://alpha-ux.co/new-years-resolution-product- managers-8-books-read-2015/)</comment>


"Plonk" - <AUTHOR> http://rs79.vrx.net/works/usenet/terms/plonk/ <comment><USER2> Fascinating... I knew * plonk * made a sound, but by 1994 I had always heard it retronymmed to "put loser on newsgroup killfile", which wasn't quite satisfying - Why the awkward phrasing?

Now I know the truth. You can't stop the signal.</comment>


File systems unfit as distributed storage back ends: 10 years of Ceph - <AUTHOR> http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2019/11/sosp19-file-systems-unfit-as.html <comment><USER2> Something that is not mentioned, though, is that all the years patching existing FS were an _education_ in how a FS works. They likely wouldn't have had enough knowledge to go balls-out on a new FS at the start. So that 2-year effort was really much longer.

</comment><comment><USER3> See also the Adrian Colyer discussion (if you have deja vu, this is why, but it's not a repeat of that post): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21460759](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21460759)

</comment><comment><USER4> I found the story of how Backblaze stores things "on top of", versus "in" filesystems similarly interesting. [https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault- cloud-storage-architect...](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud- storage-architecture/)

It seems like they could go one further and eliminate the ext4 underneath.

<comment><USER5> You'd love this: [https://maisonbisson.com/post/object-storage-prior-art- and-l...](https://maisonbisson.com/post/object-storage-prior-art-and-lit- review/)

Talks about Facebook, Instagram, S3 and other Object Store services and how they deal with storage at scale.

<comment><USER6> thanks for the link!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ceph is awesome, even years ago it was a great Technology. We from croit.io do provide a free software to manage Ceph with ease.

<comment> core-questions Looks slick, you got downvoted because you dared to promote something but this actually looks like a reasonable value-add. Ceph is one of those things that's just a bit risky for orgs without the subject specific expertise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yes it really cannot emphasized enough that the legacy filesystem system interface with it's too-simple 1970s origin and then far, far, far too complex decades of duck tape is a disasterous albatros.

C.f. What linus is saying in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21673372](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21673372) except turn it around. When an interface has devolved into two sides hating and Postel's-law-enabling each other ad infinitum, and a statement like his is actually justifiable, it's time to close up shop and move on. Nothing good will ever come from POSIX-like storage ever again, and any storage system built around it is doomed to be a mess of too many layers and also too many layer violations. Utter hopelessness.

<comment><USER9> > Yes it really cannot emphasized enough that the legacy filesystem system > interface with it's too-simple 1970s origin and then far, far, far too > complex decades of duck tape is a disasterous albatros.

Except that nobody will sign on.

Look at what happened to FreeBSD in the 5.0 timeframe when they reworked their storage layers into GEOM. It was a _NIGHTMARE_. Most people agreed it needed to be done, but there was an _excruciatingly_ loud segment who complained incessantly. It took some gigantic brass balls and asbestos-lined flamesuits on the part of FreeBSD heavy hitters to drive it through.

If the system in Linux is to get fixed, _Linus_ would probably have to step in and pronounce.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe the OS is not the right layer for this?

<comment><USER10> What other layer could it be in? (Legitimately curious)

<comment><USER11> In userland, for one. Or an unprivileged service in a microkernel O/S. There are a lot of concerns jammed into the current concept of filesystem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This all makes me grateful that I use sqlite3 instead of FS for storage, even for fairly trivial projects.

<comment><USER13> Could you expand a little on how you're doing that?

I've been thinking about transitioning entirely to sqlite for all my data.

<comment><USER14> The GP may seem like sarcasm to some ... sqlite is an overlooked, novel, and faster way (up to 35%!) to store things than the filesystem [0].

You can use something like libsqlfs [1] for POSIX file heuristics with sqlite as the backing store.

One HA single primary/multi-master solution to use sqlite may be drbd.

[0] [https://www.sqlite.org/fasterthanfs.html](https://www.sqlite.org/fasterthanfs.html) [1] [https://github.com/guardianproject/libsqlfs](https://github.com/guardianproject/libsqlfs)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Brilliant, but I wonder now that we know how filesystems work if we could redesign ceph to do the right thing. For instance a lot of work was made to schedule the important writes at the right time. Perhaps they could have handled these latency issues explicitly.

</comment><comment><USER16> Was it Ceph they were using at CERN (ATLAS Project, at least?) they were using some kind of file system federation.

<comment><USER4> Googling isn't much help. You can find references to AFS, DFS, VM-FS, and EOS...all being used at CERN.

<comment><USER16> Oh I see, I was thinking of AFS, I'm sure, I thought it was built on ceph or vice versa.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hi! This could have been submitted as an HTTPS link.

<comment><USER18> I assume if the owner of the site wanted to redirect all http->https traffic they would do so.

<comment><USER17> Doing that doesn't actually solve the problem though. A MITM attacker still gets to read and modify all that content.

<comment><USER4> I don't believe blogspot allows you to turn off http, just (optionally) redirect it to https.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> But ceph has the bluestore backend that doesn't go through the file system.

<comment><USER10> That was the punchline of the post... file systems add too much extra overhead, so they wrote a storage backend without the file system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am solving for this problem right now and my solution is working great cross OS. The file system is not the files contained by that system. The thing that effects performance is the CPU time for compression.

</comment><comment><USER21> MapR-FS is a great distributed file system, which solves tons of challenges out of the box. E.g. HA, POSIX, NFS, multi tenancy, multi-temprature, co- location, and sexurity.</comment>


Zesty: First 300 sign-up's get invites to be the first users - <AUTHOR> http://gozesty.com/

<comment><USER2> These guys have the office space next to us. A great product by a solid team. Worth checking out.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks jazzy :)</comment>