Why was '~' chosen to represent the home directory? - <AUTHOR> http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/34196/design-question-why-was-chosen-to-represent-the-home-directory <comment><USER3> I really liked the additional info on the vim-navigation-keys. Really interesting to see, how the design of specific hardware shaped the "how to use" for generations to come.

I really have my problems, to wrap my head around "hjkl", as there is (imho) no logical mnemonic for the directions. It is sadly just "learn by rote".

<comment><USER4> Put this in your .vimrc:

      " Disable arrow keys
      noremap <Up> <nop>
      noremap <Down> <nop>
      noremap <Left> <nop>
      noremap <Right> <nop>

You'll have one or two frustrating days, but after that your muscle memory will take care of remembering "hjkl" for you.

<comment><USER5> Every keyboard now has a set of hardware arrowkeys sensibly arranged in an inverted-T, where up means up, left means left, etc. Since everyone is used to that arrangement without any mental effort, macho vim types tell you to force yourself to write with your feet basically to show how hardcore you are. They tell you to use your customization ability in .vimrc to block the sensible arrangement in order to force yourself to learn a ridiculous one that has no advantage other than being the one that we old-timers had to learn before there were sensible arrowkeys.

I used that arrangement back in the 1980s myself, but when keyboards evolved, so did I. I remapped the movement keys to match the other movement keys (arrowkeys).

If you're going to go to the effort of customizing your vim to force yourself to learn a new keyboard arrangement, customize it so that the movement keys are ijkl instead of hjkl, so that both of your sets of arrowkeys are in the same, natural, modern, inverted-T arrangement. Then you don't have to deactivate those real arrowkeys, because there won't be any temptation to use them with the ijkl keys in the same arrangement and easier to reach.

"Oh, no!" people half my age will shriek. "Then what happens to the 'i' key? This would be impossible." Just use the now-unused key on the left ('h') for your insert-on-left. Reach left to insert on left. There, easy.

Funny how those who insist that YOU should relearn something as fundamental as the entire inverted-T arrowkey structure built into the hardware of every keyboard and used by almost all apps on all platforms including kids' game boxes find relearning a single, arbitrary 'i' key such an insurmountable obstacle to themselves.

But what if you have to use a copy of vim on a machine without your customized .vimrc? Sorry, but that's just an argument against ANY useful customization of vim. It's just not a problem, because the real arrowkeys on the keyboard are in the arrangement you're used to using on the ijkl keys. Just use the real arrowkeys temporarily or copy over your .vimrc. I've done it for years.

But what about other editors that have a vi mode? What about something like zsh with a vi mode? These things can be remapped to match your .vimrc unless they only offer a couple of keys, in which case they can be treated just like all apps with their own couple of local keyboard shortcuts.

Really, if the standard advice is, "You'll have one or two frustrating days, but after that your muscle memory will take care of remembering "hjkl" for you," then you can take your own advice and keep the inverted-T muscle memory you already have for the movement keys and reduce your task to learning a single 'h' key for insertion, and save the next generation from this nonsense.

If a 30-yr user of vi like me isn't stuck with the historical accidents of the past, why should new users have to be?

<comment><USER6> Bravo! From the other comments, I guess you are going against the 'common sense' of vim users, but actually hjml has been _the_ reason I never bothered with vim. Having to replace years (or decades) of T-arrowkeys (in windows, and in every FPS) seems utterly insane to me (and probably to most people that grew up with them)

<comment><USER7> I wish Linux just came with Edit.com.

Arrow keys for movement, letter keys for input (what a novelty?!), and a working mouse. All available since MS Dos 6 or earlier.

I understand that some people like VIM and or Emacs, but why must UNIX people force such arcane editors down people's throats? Edit.com put them to shame almost twenty years ago.

Yes, I know, if you spend YEARS learning clever key combinations you can be ever so slightly more efficient, what a novelty...

<comment><USER8> Nano and pico gives you that... Available on most unix systems.

<comment><USER9> +1 for nano... I only make relatively quick config changes from a console... so nano is much less of a learning curve... I'd rather not have to memorize a bunch of commands for my general text editing. I do prefer a GUI editor, and ironically enough, Sublime Text has been increasingly my goto editor (needing to remember certain hotkeys, but still works for general arrow-key and mouse editing).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Funny how all roads lead to a discussion of the merits of vi/m.

At least some of you now understand that these tools were designed as you see them today because they were dealing with crippled hardware (from today's vantage point). There was no magical study on keystroke efficiency at the inception. They had lemons and made lemonade.

Now, quit arguing and get back to reading Facebook!

Yup, that's me ducking in the corner.

<comment><USER11> HJKL is madness. It's more proof that "The Inmates are Running the Asylum" when it comes to usability. We programmers are so much more apt at remapping functions to arbitrary inputs/symbols that we continue to put up with things like this, decades after the reason disappears. This is also why we need to make special efforts at understanding non-programmer users.

<comment><USER12> i have tried both and hjkl is just faster. it's "madness" the same way having 88 white unmarked keys on a piano is "madness" to someone who doesn't play.

<comment><USER10> Sometimes stirring-up shit can be a win-win situation.

I could agree with you and get the anti-vim guys all worked up. I could even back it up with random links and examples from all over the web.

I could also disagree with you and get pro-vim guys all riled-up. Again, suitable links, stats and a photo of some guy with carpal-tunnel would do the trick.

That's great stuff!

To quote one of the most memorable lines in motion picture lore:

"Interesting game. The only way to win is not to play."

I use vim. And I've used everything else. I don't care. All of it pales in magnitude to the efficiency losses elsewhere in the process of developing a software product.

My guess is that on a daily basis I waste more time going for a cup of coffee, shooting the shit, reading/posting on HN, getting pulled in all manner of directions on the internet than any text editor could save me short of a brain-to-code interface.

And, of course, there's the actual work of figuring out how to code something. I've spent days diagraming state machines with, yes, hold-on, paper and pencil. Once there, an hour or two and the bug-free code is written and working. Yes, even if you use Notepad.

You want to be more efficient? Get really good at going from problem to finished, shippable, documented, flexible, reusable and bug-free code. What you use to enter said code probably does not matter.

I'm going back to polishing my keyboard.

Maybe you guys ought to do the same.

<comment><USER13> robomartin: A voice of reason in a sea of inane babble.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the vote of confidence. Now I have the challenge of actually trying to be that person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> On a side note, stackexchange is getting pretty impressive.

<http://stackexchange.com/sites>

</comment><comment><USER15> If I recall correctly, control-^ (i.e. 0x1e, aka control-~) would move the ADM-3A cursor to the "home" location on the screen (i.e. the top left) if sent from the host. If you were talking to a host that was echoing your keystrokes (and maybe if you set a DIP switch for half-duplex mode?) then typing control-^ (aka control-~) would do that too.

The terminfo entry seems to confirm this (apt-get source ncurses-term && less +/^adm3a ncurses-5.9/misc/terminfo.src):

        adm3a|lsi adm3a,
            OTbs, am,
            cols#80, lines#24,
            OTma=^K^P, OTnl=^J, bel=^G, clear=\032$<1/>, cr=^M, cub1=^H,
            cud1=^J, cuf1=^L, cup=\E=%p1%{32}%+%c%p2%{32}%+%c,
            cuu1=^K, home=^^, ind=^J, kcub1=^H, kcud1=^J, kcuf1=^L,
            kcuu1=^K, rs2=^N,

I think the speculations about ^ in regexps coming from the same source are misplaced, because I think the ed editor was already using ^ to mean "beginning of line" before there were any CRT terminals.

The ADM-3A had direct cursor addressing, as referenced in the "cup" capability in the above terminfo entry, so the "home" feature was, strictly speaking, redundant. As you can see from the simplicity of the terminfo entry (notably its almost complete lack of escape sequences) logic was aggressively minimized in this termainal. I seem to recall from glancing inside the ADM-3As I bought at auction in my childhood that it was built almost entirely out of discrete 7400-series logic, so every extra control character involved adding several chips.

In light of this, I suspect that the "home" feature may have been retained for backwards compatibility with something else — maybe the ADM-3? But the ADM-3 terminfo entry doesn't mention "home", so I don't know.

More details about the ADM-3A can be found at <[http://manx.classiccmp.org/details/11,5618>](http://manx.classiccmp.org/details/11,5618>).

</comment><comment><USER16> Still using Sun Unix keyboard with tilde on the right, and no obnoxious Windows keys ;) Control in the middle row on the left is also helpful in order not to stress the pinky.

<comment><USER17> You can remap keys in modern operating systems. Any sane person will remap capslock to something they use more often (eg. ctrl or alt). Who needs capslock anyway?

<comment><USER18> I used to think the same way until I suffered neurological damage that affects the sensory nerves in my fingers. Holding down the shift key while I type some all-caps text, like "STUPID_SHOUTY_MACRO_NAME", is uncomfortable, so I now find the caps lock key useful. It would be nice to have it as a control key, but I would want some other way to activate the caps lock function. Maybe a double tap on the shift key, like on the iPhone keypad, would work.

<comment><USER19> I actually find holding shift nicer for STUPIDLY_LONG_MACROS and whatnot since those underscores require shift and don't work with capslock.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why oh why did the ADM-3A keyboard not use a gamer configuration for its arrow navigation keys. What a noob designed that!

He could have gone for wasd or ijkl. But he had to go with hjkl!

Anyway, the fact that j looks like a down arrow is a very good thing that makes me remember it and allow me to play nethack.

<comment><USER21> Even worse, it didn't use Cherry red switches, and it looked like crap. Where were the bright red LEDs, macro shortcut buttons, and elaborate wrist-rest?!

<comment><USER20> Cherry red, the linear ones? Why not Cherry brown or blue?

<comment><USER21> Reds appear to be preferred by the hardcore gamers that buy those monstrous gaming keyboards. I think it's because they're lighter, and also because they're linear.

<comment><USER22> Right. Reds are linear better if you're going to be pressing keys and holding them down, as for moving in an FPS. But Browns, are better if you want a single keypress event registered, as for using the keyboard to type.

<comment><USER23> I honestly can't tell if this is a legitimate conversation or a parody! : P

But seriously, I spent the longest time assuming that the talk about better keyboard were exaggerations or placebo effect deals, until I started using the MBP keyboard, which just felt significantly better than anything I'd used before, sort of satisfying.

So I've got an open mind now, and am planning on hand-me-downing my apple wireless to a friend in need. Does anyone have a specific recommendation for a keyboard for programming that might be a decent replacement?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The ctrl location on that old machine is much more handy. I've changed my caps lock to ctrl for years.

<comment><USER21> Same here. I do, however, hate that most keyboards have a `stepped' Caps Lock key, presumably to stop people accidentally activating it when they type an `a'. Thankfully, my laptop _doesn't_ , and neither does my keyboard at home.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Ah yes, I used the baby blue version. Probably my favorite terminal until the HP2621a (which had a _great_ character set, "modern" housing, and nice loud beep). Since I used the line editor to program I only really used HJKL as cursor keys in rogue. :-)

</comment><comment><USER26> I use vim a lot, but as I was reading this, I realized that unless I was in a vim session (or pretended that I was in one), I couldn't remember which of the hjkl keys mapped to which direction.

<comment><USER27> I think playing Crawl a ton is the only reason I remember so well. But playing too much crawl makes me think I can also move diagonally in vim (yubn).

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Looks like it also explains why caret (^) was chosen in regex and vi to mean "beginning of line".

</comment><comment><USER29> What does the "Rub" key do ?

<comment><USER30> Delete a character i.e. "rub out", presumably.

<comment><USER29> Is that a carryover from the typewriter days ?

<comment><USER31> Teletypes, not typewriters, punching out paper tape.

<comment><USER32> ANd 'DEL' is 0x7F in ASCII - so it would punch all the holes, the only way to make 1 char punch turn anything to the same thing.

<comment><USER33> And this is why DEL is properly a _forward_ delete operation: it erases the character under the cursor and advances (the tape) over the next.

I blame the VT220 for screwing this up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> B-Con Badly off-topic, but I found it amusing that the user asking the question was "Lelouch Lamperouge". The juxtaposition of Lelouch and "home" brought that series back into my mind full-force.

</comment><comment><USER34> So why was '~' chosen over '^'?

</comment><comment><USER35> 100+ upvotes for a lmgtfy answer :(

<comment><USER36> That wasn't a lmgtfy answer. It was a constructive link to an encyclopaedia article, with a relevant quote from that article, and a relevant image. There were also links to other sources of information.

lmgtfy is hateful because it often links to the same search that the asker has previously done, and returns the same not-useful hits. But the answerer doesn't check the returned hits, and just smugly slaps lmgtfy in to "teach" the asker a lesson about searching before asking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Thanks for this post.

<comment><AUTHOR> Welcome! :-)

Actually, I stumbled over that question during my quest of unifying my keyboard-layouts (Mac=Work and Linux=Private) via xmodmap.

<comment><USER38> Is that even possible? No matter which way I've tried mapping the keys on OS X, something just can't be placed in the right spot on the keyboard - <USER2> because many uses of CTRL are placed on the equivalent of Mod-4 (the Command key).

Unless you're just trying to simulate an Apple keyboard configuration on Linux, that is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> So this is what HN has come to eh? Just random trivia links. Cat pictures can't be more than two weeks off.

<comment><USER40> I disagree. This is a very interesting data point representative of a broader pattern:

Why do we use X?

Because N years ago, the environment looked like E1, and so X made sense. Then, people got used to X as a convention, and even though our environment changed to E2, we still use X because of network effects.

A great way to improve the world is to understand where X came from, understand how E2 differs from E1, and then invent Y to better fit E2.

The hard part is that Y needs to be significantly better than X so that you can get people to switch given that X has stronger network effects.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Percentages of developers who blog, release code online? - <AUTHOR>

I find it's easy to forget many developers are effectively completely invisible online. I guess people just don't feel the need to broadcast information to everyone. So, out of interest:
What percentage of your coworkers - maintain a blog? - post code online? is it a big company or a startup? location? (i.e. the valley or elsewhere?)
I am interested whether we find the 1% rule ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) ) applies to developers&blogging, developers&posting code, or not. In my experience at least (small UK company), it's true for blogging, but not for posting code. About 1/4 the people I work with have a github account. <comment><USER2> My kneejerk reaction to this is that it's very hard for a programmer-type to write. Part of programming is of course discipline, attention to detail, conciseness, etc. The same things apply to writing but it comes across much much harder because we don't actively write, we code.

So writing is hard and when we write we know we suck. And we don't want to publish things that suck so we don't publish at at all!

Finally, blogging software is a pain in the ass to deal with _as a programmer_. Over the years I've had 5 properties (2 WP blogs, google group, posterous, custom site, and tumblr) I'd post at most 3 articles to them and then go years without updating it.

I just didn't _get_ the workflow, and maybe that's an excuse but now I think writing is so important that I did what any insane programmer would do when faced with a "my tools aren't good enough" challenge, I made it my damned self:

<http://jekyllbootstrap.com> which spawned <http://ruhoh.com>

\- Just my personal take on your question.

</comment><comment><USER3> I blog at <http://bkvirendra.github.com>

But its really difficult to express myself on my Blog as I really suck at it !!</comment>


Our Silk-Making Process - <AUTHOR> http://nishiyamasilk.com/our-process

<comment><USER2> Completely defeated by the interface. I have no idea if my scrolling had any effect on the position of anything, or how and why anything was playing, stopping, or advancing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think your scroll button controls it.

I did find it tough to figure out myself. There is also a film linked down in the bottom left corner which shows much of it. I don't know if it is narrated, but it seems like the bits on the "Our Process" page come from the film.</comment></comment>


Overenthusiastic Quora Notifications and More - <AUTHOR> http://blog.brotherboard.com/2012/09/12/overenthusiastic-quora-notifications-and-more/

<comment><USER2> Quora is really scaring off some people. I think there is room for competition here.

see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4508273></comment>


Getting Your Startup Noticed and Covered by Blogs - <AUTHOR> http://blog.zferral.com/post/972974853/startup-marketing-getting-your-startup-noticed-and <comment><USER2> _First, read startup marketing advice by @Balsamiq_

Cannot stress this enough. When we started marketing our company last month we used Peldi from Balsamiq's post as our playbook. It worked...really really well. VentureBeat, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, and a number of smaller blogs specific to our industry covered us before we even launched (that would be today).

Not to take anything away from this post, but [http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/2008/08/05/startup-marketing- ad...](http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/2008/08/05/startup-marketing-advice-from- balsamiq-studios/) is the best free advice I've ever received.

<comment><USER3> Definitely agree, 100% which is why I said it was the first place to go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just started a blog called 30startups. I started it so that I could post reviews and announcements of startups that have recieved funding or that are just launching. It's only about a month old right now but i'm starting to see an increase in traffic. If you have a startup that you would like me to post about on my blog, I would be more than happy to, just click on "submit a startup" at the top of the page and fill out the form. It gives you guys and your startups more exposure and it gives me some great content to write about.

I don't mean for this to be spam to promote my site, I just want to let you guys know that I'm more than happy to blog about your startups

-Dave <http://www.30startups.com>

<comment><USER3> Cool, I will check it out. Seems to be a fine contribution to the thread!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I liked this article, because rather than being a bunch of abstract advice, it just comes out and says "go to these sites, do these things," which I felt was a nice change of pace. Also, Jeff from Zferral is a great guy.

<comment><USER3> Thanks Steve, appreciate it. Nothing earth-shattering but useful nonetheless..

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Make a great product and it covers itself.

<comment><USER3> I would be interested in hearing from companies that actually believed that and spent no time or effort on PR / Marketing...

<comment><USER6> google

<comment><USER7> Google ran a Superbowl Ad this year. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU>

<comment><USER6> I do not think they advertised much back in 1998 though. Once you get to be what google is, then sure.

I do not think twitter advertises much either. So, build it and they will come works sometimes when the product is great, but sure with advertising it works even more.

<comment><USER8> Twitter does not do any _outright_ advertising but they put an incredible amount of time into their PR management, as well as making sure that their coverage in the news was kept high and positive all through 2009.

Their early claim to fame also was when they broadcasted the #sxsw Tweetstream in a hallway during SXSW 2007, after which their traffic launched substantially and effectively bootstrapped the service into the powerhouse it is today. They most certainly didn't sit on their asses hoping that the merits of their product would grant them traffic.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How will this software get my users laid? - <AUTHOR> http://valleywag.com/tech/romance/how-will-this-software-get-my-users-laid-heres-how-233037.php <comment><USER2> I'd like to propose a theorem.

X = the number of possible actions a user can take on your site. Y = the number of actions that can potentially get them laid.

X / Y = the probability of success of your social software. Let's call it the jwz ratio.

</comment><comment><USER3> A number of people have gotten married through Flickr...

http://www.flickr.mud.yahoo.com/photos/matt/1424625/

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm trying to apply this to Reddit, but I'm drawing a blank.

<comment><USER5> mmm, great article submitted about manipulating women using psychological, emotional and cognitive means. Dude reads article - leaves computer, meets a girl. Dude gets laid.

alternatively: article submitted on how to scale dating sites. Dude has idea and builds new-fangled dating site. Many people get laid by dating site. Dude gets famous for getting other people laid. Many girls thank dude. Dude gets laid.

<comment><USER4> news.yc is a little more straightforward: geek reads submitted articles. Geek learns about building startups. Geek applies to YC. Geek gets rich. Geek gets laid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Moo.com Mini Cards: Guy gives girl pretty moo card. Girl likes pretty moo card. Girl calls guy using number on back of moo card. Guy gets laid.</comment>


Amazon Web Services CEO: We're a $30b revenue business in the 'early stages' - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/28/amazon-cloud-ceo-we-have-a-30-billion-run-rate-in-our-early-stages.html <comment><USER2> I really wish they reduce their public bandwidth cost to half. It will make such a major impact on the internet as a whole that we will see lots of companies grow faster and newer video heavy apps launching.

<comment><USER3> Here's a few ideas to start a video heavy app on a budget:

You could store files in a Backblaze B2 bucket and serve them via Cloudflare with zero bandwidth fees. Or try DigitalOcean's Spaces offering with their built-in CDN at $0.01/GB for bandwidth.

Hardware video encoding could be done using cheap Hetzner servers that include GTX 1080 GPU's (lookup NVENC) or try Intel Quick Sync encoding (perhaps using OVH's overclocked i7-7700K CPU's).

<comment><USER4> >You could store files in a Backblaze B2 bucket and serve them via Cloudflare with zero bandwidth fees.

From Cloudflare's TOS [0]:

>2.8 Limitation on Non-HTML Caching

>The Service is offered primarily as a platform to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless explicitly included as a part of a Paid Service purchased by you, you agree to use the Service solely for the purpose of serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other application and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) protocol or other equivalent technology. Use of the Service for the storage or caching of video (unless purchased separately as a Paid Service) or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content, is prohibited.

Of course Cloudflare offers commercial plans that feature video CDN, but it will cost you and it will cost you similarly to other video CDN providers.

[0] [https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/](https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/)

<comment><USER5> All this means is that your main website, where these files are embedded/served from, also needs to be on Cloudflare (and proxied).

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure that would follow

> disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML > content, is prohibited.

If your video sharing app has any decent usage your ratios are gonna get in their red zone pretty quick...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Unlike the old web hosting platfors, Cloud computing is becoming a big monopoly. Which is really bad for everyone.

We are in early stages and the monopoly will get worse.

<comment><USER8> How are we even close to a monopoly? I could maybe see a oligopoly, but even though amazon is big, its not the whole market.

<comment><USER9> Its the only serious use case for enterprise.

What, you want to use azure?

<comment><USER10> I worked at Amazon for over 5 years and I currently work for a pretty big company (you've heard of them) that's all-in on Azure. It's got enough going for it that I wouldn't switch even if I were high enough in the hierarchy to make that decision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I love AWS.

Some things that I think can still happen on AWS, if not already happening:

VPC Images!

Basically a VPC launch button that has a series of terraform/*form rules that deploy a SaaS-in-a-box:

Meaning, VPC images of infra to support a business case.

Want to start up an infra that can receive video uploads and display them on a portal? Click here.

etc...

<comment><USER7> The first item in my wish list is a better and more intuitive Cloudformation.

So much busy work they've created around their platform.

<comment><USER12> This is the AWS Cloud Development Kit. It is still under very active development, so keep that in mind as a caveat, but it provides a much higher level, much more simple and intuitive way to define cloud infrastructure as code in your favorite languages: [https://github.com/awslabs/aws- cdk](https://github.com/awslabs/aws-cdk)

For context I've been able to take thousands of lines of CloudFormation YAML and replace it with around 500 lines of much clearer and easier to read JavaScript. And that 500 lines automatically builds five Lambda functions, builds, pushes, and launches two Docker images that run in AWS Fargate, configures an API Gateway and a CloudFront distribution.

CDK is really a game changer in terms of allowing developers to take an idea and turn it into infrastructure as code extremely quickly and properly (CDK automatically generates many best practices like minimal IAM roles, minimal security group settings, etc)

<comment><USER7> I'd not call CDK an intuitive replacement for Cloudformation. It is like, hey guys! we don't have a better solution to give them a common tool/language to provision their stack. So lets make it an object-oriented abstraction, at least give them auto-complete.

<comment><USER12> CDK does a lot more than just be an object oriented abstraction. Often times one of the constructs in CDK actually makes many different underlying AWS resources.

In CloudFormation its always a 1:1 mapping: one CloudFormation resource typed out as YAML, one resource created on your AWS account. In CDK you can make something like "LoadBalancedFargateService" and just plug in the path to your local Dockerfile, and it builds and uploads the image to ECR, makes a Fargate service, makes a load balancer, connects the service to the load balancer, and returns the URL to you.

The other power of CDK is it sets things up right out of the box. Rather than having to explicitly created all your autoscaling rules it can create sensible default ones for you automatically. It also automatically creates the right IAM rules, and security group rules that you would otherwise have to define manually.

As a whole I'd say comparing CloudFormation and CDK is like comparing assembly language and C++. You could write your code as a bunch of hand rolled ASM for the most control, but realistically that's not feasible for large projects as its error prone, slow, and quickly gets unwieldly. CDK is like higher level C++ that synthesizes back down into the lower level assembly language that creates all those cloud resources

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Strongly Agree with Andy in that interview.

In U.S , one way or another everything is running in the cloud.

For Europe ? It's more complicated , most large businesses still have their own datacenters or run using dedicated machine with European hosting (OVH).

I've worked for many differents banks and they barely use the cloud compared to startups like N26 or Revolut.

Same thing for Industries or Health Services they largely run « On Premise » compared to U.S equivalent.

There is still room for growth from Europe if they manage to convince leaders of large corporations that the cloud will not take the their sovereignty away from them .

<comment><USER14> Europe is the next big cloud customer since they're always behind US for tech adoption.

<comment><USER15> Always is a strong word.

France had usable networked computers everywhere long before the us did (it was called minitel)

Over on the UK my local Telco (not BT) was doing video on demand over copper ~2000, they where also one of the first to switch a fully packet switched internal backbone (so successfully other telcos came to look at how they did it).

We had chip and pin a decade before the US.

Our median internet connection is better.

Is the US the world leader sure, always ahead..not so much.

<comment><USER16> Internet in US is just terrible for 90% of the population. Even if you are in the Bay Area or Manhattan you are still getting bad speed and you are stuck with a provider like Spectrum or Comcast and you pay 70$ for 150-200Mbps. I just don't see this changing anytime soon :(

<comment><USER17> I pay $70 a month for gigabit AT&T fiber in a southern city, 10 miles from the city center.

<comment><USER18> in nyc, i pay $100 for gigabit

<comment><USER19> Sweden.10Gbps for 30$ / month. It's kind of a long-running launch campaign, but still. [https://www.bahnhof.se/villafiber/](https://www.bahnhof.se/villafiber/)

<comment><USER20> Whats the typical bandwidth quota? Surely they wont let u saturate a 10gig pipe ..

<comment><USER15> I've got 400Mbs/35Mbps with no cap (literally unlimited) which would cap out at a round 4TB a day if I ever had a reason and could saturate it.

10Gbps domestically is insane though, that's pushing 100TB a day!.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Makes you wonder if one day AWS will overtake its parent.

<comment><USER22> AWS carried Amazon out of mediocrity in 2008. It accounts for something like 70% of operating revenue. What does 'overtake' mean?

<comment><USER23> I'm not sure how Amazon was mediocre by any measure in 2008 but your second statement is incorrect - AWS only accounts for ~10% of Amazon's revenue. [https://venturebeat.com/2019/01/31/amazon- earnings-q4-2018/](https://venturebeat.com/2019/01/31/amazon- earnings-q4-2018/)

<comment><USER22> > how Amazon was mediocre by any measure in 2008

History is there for analysis. The stock falling to April2007 levels in Sept2008 showed serious volatility and hadn't yet declared profits that carried it above Sun and Toy R Us yet. It was somewhere in the top 300 profitable companies. It was still carrying the HUGE debt load that they have been carrying over to enable yet another tax free year in 2018, despite another record year. Quite a bet to make that they would be successful where AWS was just exiting beta. It was completely orthogonal to their barely-on- track online retail business model. It was a meh company and the stock price reflected that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It is time for Kubernetes and other solutions to build a decentralized federated cloud offering.

</comment><comment><USER25> Maybe they can get half of their services to work properly then?

</comment><comment><USER26> If AWS gets Serverless right....and they are so far with Layers and Runtime API, they are in for a new golden era.

I know people have been on the edge about serverless in the past but it's now reached a point where I'm planning to actively employ them. 2019, will be the Year of Serverless methinks.

<comment><USER27> It will be great when serverless aurora's data api can run sql queries at 5ms- ish latency instead of the current 200ms. Then lambda functions will be able to use sql in a performant way. For applications that need relational databases, fargate seems to still be the best option.</comment></comment>


A Beating in Berkeley - <AUTHOR> http://www.weeklystandard.com/a-beating-in-berkeley/article/2009498 <comment><USER2> Lie with dogs, get fleas.

Joey Gibson has repeatedly embraced some truly horrible people in Portland, and claims ignorance when he is met with fury. He's a provocateur and knows exactly what he is doing.

For example, Allen Pucket, a frequent speaker at his local rallies:

[http://rosecityantifa.org/articles/allen- pucket/](http://rosecityantifa.org/articles/allen-pucket/)

This guy has been a fixture in Portland for years, but entered national prominence when he showed up to scream at brown people at the Portland airport after Trump's first visa ban. He regularly harasses pride marchers in Portland, stands outside gay bars with a megaphone to harass patrons, but he managed to find a friend in Joey Gibson's Patriot Prayer - all in the name of Freeze Peach, of course.

SSDD

<comment><USER3> It seems to me you are promoting guilt by association while condoning extrajudicial violence by masked vigilantes against those exercising their constitutionally protected rights. Or did I miss something?

<comment><USER4> That was my interpretation as well.

This is the result of the line of thinking that goes from "we're against bad people" to "those who don't agree with us are bad people" to "it's OK to punch bad people".

Antifa have become the very thing they supposedly oppose.

<comment><USER2> > Antifa have become the very thing they supposedly oppose.

You know the funny thing about Antifa? They would cease to exist if these aspiring fascists stopped supporting violence (direct or state-sponsored) against minority communities. You can't say the opposite is true. This attempt at moral equivalence is weak, weak, weak.

Joey Gibson loudly, proudly aligns with fascist white nationalists and gaybashers, goes to liberal enclaves to provoke (er... "trigger" \-- in his words) and gets punched. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Despite all the Freeze Peach winging that goes on here - "Fighting Words" are an important limitation of that right in the 'States. Gibson walks hand-in- hand with those who regularly threaten violence and intimidate minorities. There is no "both sides-ism" on this issue in civil society. You can't simultaneously support those who terrorize American minorities and claim you are supporting our nation's ideals. The math isn't that difficult here.

EDIT: And before you drag the ACLU into this as a counterexample a) they have a solid track record of defending _all sides_ \- where Gibson clearly has an agenda to provoke one side and b) they have drawn the line at defending armed protest after the shit show in Charlottesville.

<comment><USER5> >They would cease to exist if these aspiring fascists stopped supporting violence (direct or state-sponsored) against minority communities.

They would have to be a surprisingly disciplined bunch of radicals were that to be the case.

<comment><USER2> > They would have to be a surprisingly disciplined bunch of radicals were that > to be the case.

True, white supremacists don't exactly have a great history of non-violence.

<comment><USER5> I was talking about Antifa, but yes.

Although it is easier for the white supremacists to keep the law on their side, unfortunately. The ones who aren't utter thugs know not to throw the first punch. There's probably a lot of low hanging fruit left, though. But would Antifa really just pack up their masks and bats and go home if the white supremacists stopped giving them the rationale around which they've built their identity? It seems doubtful to me.

<comment><USER2> > But would Antifa really just pack up their masks and bats and go home ... ?

You know that "Antifa" has been around in various incarnations since 1930s, right? They have "packed up and gone home" many times over the past 80+ years as fascist/far-right movements have come and gone.

Also, I believe giving agency to the latest version of "Antifa" as some sort of cohesive, organized group is a mistake. I don't believe they have any sort of hierarchy or are particularly well organized, beyond doing a good job consistently showing up at recent far-right rallies.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Facebook Moving To The JVM  - <AUTHOR> http://nerds-central.blogspot.ro/2012/08/facebook-moving-to-jvm.html

<comment><USER2> already posted:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4373461></comment>


The Mobility Trap: Why We'll Never Fix Congestion by Speeding Up Traffic - <AUTHOR> https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/8/28/the-mobility-trap-why-well-never-fix-congestion-by-speeding-up-traffic <comment><USER2> >So what do we achieve by building new highways and speeding up travel? We don't actually shorten people's trips; we just enable them to live and work farther away from each other.

That is a good thing. One of the reasons why the Bay Area is so expensive is that the commute to cheaper areas in Central Valley is so long. Mobility allows choices. The type of home and the neighborhood you want to live in, is no longer as tightly coupled to the type of job you want to do, the place of worship you want to attend, the school you want your kids to go to, or the doctor your family wants to see.

Yeah, having a corner grocery might be good, but without mobility, the grocers are going to realize that you don't really have much choice about buying from them, and maybe start charging higher prices, or not stocking as much variety, or higher fewer people and having less service.

Mobility means more choice, and more decoupling. This means you not having to live in a high priced, crappy home because of proximity to your job. The further the distance we can make 30 minutes of commute, the more choices people have.

<comment><USER3> But the high speed of travel is effected by making virtually everything pavement. You're just traveling through nothing (well, asphalt).

Thanks to parking minimums the actual buildings you want to go to are _dwarfed_ by their parking lots.

[https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/06/13/the-whole-city-of- flo...](https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/06/13/the-whole-city-of-florence- could-fit-inside-an-atlanta-interchange/)

Also, forcing everything to be so far apart makes it nearly impossible to traverse on foot, serve with public transport, ride a bike to, etc.

<comment><USER4> Dense urban living also requires most of your surroundings to be pavement.

<comment><USER5> Have you never been to old European cities? They're beautiful and dense. Hell, even London has many parts that are dense compared to US cities yet are beautifully old and green (like Hampstead and Highgate!).

At the end of it, we live in a world where every bit of profit matters more than earning slightly less and having something better looking.

I mean let's compare Los Angeles County vs Greater London: 4,058 sq mi vs 606 sq mi Density 2,100/sq m vs 14,550/sq mi.

I mean the difference is insane! And ignoring the towers springing up all over London because of greedy developers, London doesn't feel all that cramped or as if there's concrete everywhere.

US cities need better public transport and more dense areas. Leave the rest to nature!

<comment><USER6> > greedy developers

What's wrong with people building things that others want to buy?

<comment><USER7> What's wrong is that there is no profit in selling real estate and housing at below market value, by definition. And in places like the bay, market rents are not affordable to an increasingly large population. Hence, the greedy perception. Developers are acting in self interest and the old system of financing predicated continuous wage growth.

<comment><USER6> Not building towers will result in even higher prices for housing.

<comment><USER5> At least in the UK the price per square foot greatly increases after each new build that replaces an older one. Surely prices would go down? You can even verify yourself. Go on a property portal such as Zoopla or Rightmove and compare the cost of a new build and old build in the same area. I have yet to find one where the new build is cheaper per square foot.

<comment><USER3> Of course, people like newer things. But how was the cost of surrounding old builds affected?

<comment><USER5> > But how was the cost of surrounding old builds affected?

Not sure I understand?

Edit: Anyway, the poster I was replying to was making the point that these towers are alleviating demand and subsequently pushing prices down, which is not happening.

<comment><USER6> That is not what I wrote. I said the prices with the tower would be lower than prices without the tower, which is not the same as saying prices would decline.

I.e. relative vs absolute.

<comment><USER5> [https://content.knightfrank.com/research/478/documents/en/20...](https://content.knightfrank.com/research/478/documents/en/2012-1101.pdf)

This research shows that there's an average of 1.5% price increase per floor. Care to share a counter-claim source?

<comment><USER6> Increasing the supply of something simply does not cause price increases. If the price increases, it's because demand is increasing even faster than supply.

<comment><USER5> At this point there's no way you aren't pulling my leg. The research paper showed that increasing the amount of floors increases the price per floor. Are you saying that these towers control demand? So if they lower the amount of floors then suddenly demand is going down because they are cheaper?

Also I do hope you know the context of my posts relate to the UK market?

<comment><USER3> People like living high above traffic. There's a reason penthouse apartments are at the top.

<comment><USER5> Bar the main roads, there's not a lot of traffic down residential streets in London.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article disproves itself. The two chief errors are as follows:

1) The article incorrectly discounts the value of time saved by avoiding congestion. The study the article cites actually estimates $7/hour for time saved on a commute, plus a whopping $22/hour for increasing reliability on a commute: [http://faculty.bus.lsu.edu/papers/pap16_07.pdf](http://faculty.bus.lsu.edu/papers/pap16_07.pdf). Both figures are critically important.

As to time savings, transit commutes are significantly longer: [https://www.geotab.com/time-to-commute](https://www.geotab.com/time-to- commute). 30% of public transit commutes in NYC are over 1 hour, compared to just 10% of car commutes. 28% of car commutes are under 30 minutes, versus just 6% of transit commutes. In Dallas, a place without the geographic constraints of NYC, 57% of car commutes are under 30 minutes. People in Dallas are accruing tremendous time value savings by driving as compared to people taking transit in NYC.

As to reliability--while in theory transit should be highly reliable, in practice it isn't. In DC, rail on-time performance is just 87%, meaning you'll be late once a week on average. NYC's performance is worse--it recently just broke 80% on-time performance: [https://www.metro- magazine.com/news/photos/734837/nyc-subway...](https://www.metro- magazine.com/news/photos/734837/nyc-subway-on-time-performance-passes-80-for- first-time-in-6-years/74646).

All this has a practical ramification. The US has some of the fastest commutes in the OECD: [https://www.oecd.org/els/family/LMF2_6_Time_spent_travelling...](https://www.oecd.org/els/family/LMF2_6_Time_spent_travelling_to_and_from_work.pdf). 48 minutes per day for the US, versus 101 for heavily transit-dependent Korea.

2) The article acknowledges that from 1982 to present, we have been able to increase vehicle miles traveled per day by 60% without significantly increasing daily commutes. The article illogically assumes that there is no value to that increased mobility. But if there wasn't nobody would do it. People do it because they would rather have a bigger, newer house, in a place with better schools, than a shorter commute. The article not only fails to quantify the value of those additional amenities, it refuses to acknowledge they even exist.

<comment><USER9> Whenever I read a smalltowns article, the article assumes high density living is great or can be drastically improved, and usually bakes in some arguments about why low density suburbs are evil.

They seem to completely ignore the votes made by people's feet on something so important to most of those people.

I have experienced some of the costs and benefits of both city and rural lifestyles, in a variety of countries.

I dislike anyone trying to restrict that choice (even if it is for the good of X).

<comment><USER10> Their argument is much more disturbing than that. They argue that middle to upper class suburban living is subsidized by taxation on people living in high density neighborhoods. These neighborhoods are predominantly populated by the poorer people. In other words, rich people are making choices and getting poor people to pay for them.

It's not that low density suburbs are evil, its that towns and cities are making unsustainable financial decisions based on deeply flawed information and as a results are bankrupting themselves and trapping poor people in urban blight.

<comment><USER11> _In other words, rich people are making choices and getting poor people to pay for them._

How much in taxes are even being paid that are being "wasted" on the rich's choices?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is like arguing having a faster CPU, GPU, more memory, or more networking speed always ends up with the same delays.

Your modern word processing software seems as low or slower at reacting to UX than old 16/32-bit processors from the 90s, even though your computer is exponentially faster.

But this completely ignores the RADICAL improvement in capability. The latest word processors may not render at 60Hz, with 16ms latency to UI events, but they are multilingual, they support vector fonts, they have collaboration features, and on and on.

Some basic phone operations might be more convenient on an old feature phone than a modern touch phone, but the smartphone delivers to much more.

Our transportation infrastructure is our nervous system, our circulatory system. Maybe adding more neurons won't let you think faster. But it might make you think in ways you couldn't before. Other animals can process and react to stimuli vastly faster than we can, but our 'latency' perhaps affords us greater capabilities.

More than thinking about individual latency, it might be worth considering whether hyper-mobility benefits the overall system granting group benefits that exceed individual costs. (or positive externalities that exceed negative externalities)

<comment><USER13> I'm pretty sure the negative externality of burning more fossil fuels because we're driving farther than ever before is a big enough problem that no positives like being able to live in a house with a big lawn is worth it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This isn't what they studied, but a simple thought experiment shows a limited use case where traffic absolutely can be helped by speeding things up.

Let's imagine a world where self driving cars are required for freeway driving; this allows them to respond in a predictable and timely manor with respect to directives to avoid lanes (and not jump the line) as well as to go at an exact speed.

An event (accident, whatever) obstructs One of Five possible lanes for use (including the HOV lane) on a section normally rated at 60 MPH.

This reduces the capacity of the road by 1/5th, or alternately, one lane of flow should be re-distributed across 4 lanes (1/4th per lane).

Idealized solution: A temporary bypass zone is communicated to the self- driving cars. There is a lead up zone where the speed is expected to ramp up to the new target, followed by a merge zone where the lanes reduce and the flow is re-shaped to balance traffic evenly. The cars would then pass the incident zone in this higher speed lane-compressed flow, before expanding out and then slowing back down to normal speed.

Due to the unexpected nature of the incident there has also been a buildup of volume before the incident, so to alleviate that slightly higher flow will be allowed to drain the high pressure area.

In the above hypothetical case, for 4 out of 5 lanes nornally at 60MPH, I would prefer to imagine: (1 + 1/4) * 60MPH => 75, but round up another 5 MPH for the bypass flow for a total of 80MPH in the corrected flow area.

Many sections of freeway could likely support that safely ; they're often engineered very well but have conservative speed limits set for political and driver quality reasons. However some sections would 'cap out' at a lower actually safe speed; in those sections the above procedure could help minimize the traffic flow impact.

However... CGP Grey really nailed the real problem: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHzzSao6ypE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHzzSao6ypE)

<comment><USER15> > _Idealized solution: A temporary bypass zone is communicated to the self- > driving cars._

There's so many great opportunities like this once the cars are self driving and connected. For example, a ten lane highway _without dividers_! 8v2 split depending on the time of day and traffic patterns. How many times have you been stuck in a lane with the other lanes in the other direction completely open?

<comment><USER16> Also, drafting. With human drivers it's not feasible to have cars travel 6 inches behind each other, because human reaction time is shitty enough that everybody would crash. With computer control you could easily have cars match speeds, then slowly get closer until they latch together and form a train. This'd both dramatically increase the carrying capacity of roads (with the default 1-car-length-per-10mph-of-speed rule, 7/8 of a highway is empty space), and it would improve fuel economy by reducing cross-sectional area and wind resistance.

<comment><USER17> This is still a terrible idea. What happens when the car in front of you has an axel failure?

Oops, my car's instant reaction time is worth nothing because the brakes cannot physically prevent my imminent death.

<comment><USER16> It seems like this is the exact same problem that was solved (to our satisfaction, at least) by trains over a century ago. If you're riding on the light rail and the train car ahead of you has an axle failure, what happens? We don't think very much about this case, because in practice it basically never happens.

<comment><USER17> It works because they're physically connected already, which would be really really difficult with cars (standardizing the connectors, etc etc). Agreeing on a standard protocol for communication is a hard enough problem to start with.

<comment><USER16> Nobody who's looked at the economics of self-driving cars realistically thinks private ownership is an option: if you're putting that much capital investment in a vehicle that could operate 12-16 hours/day, your amortized costs go up by a factor of 6-8 if it's only operating for 2 hours/day. If we get self-driving cars it'll be in the form of ridesharing or rental services.

Agreeing on a standard protocol for both connectors and communications is a relatively easy problem if you have an industry with a dozen or so operators rather than 300 million private owners. It also solves the other major reason trains don't regularly crash, which is regular maintenance.

<comment><USER18> _Nobody who 's looked at the economics of self-driving cars realistically thinks private ownership is an option: if you're putting that much capital investment in a vehicle that could operate 12-16 hours/day, your amortized costs go up by a factor of 6-8 if it's only operating for 2 hours/day. If we get self-driving cars it'll be in the form of ridesharing or rental services._

This same reasoning applies to non-self driving cars, but somehow we do have a few privately owned cars around. The only way self-driving would make it any different would be if self-driving cars were so much more expensive that only very few would be able to afford it. If you however try to estimate the shape of the demand curve, you'll note that even today that are plenty of cars sold at $100k mark, so unless self-driving cars are many hundreds of thousands of dollars each, you'll still see privately owned self-driving cars.

More importantly, once the technology is out in the wild, many manufacturers will copy it, and it will push down the markup for self-driving capability rather low. You can sell a self-driving Toyota Corolla for $100k if you're the only manufacturer of self-driving cars. Once Nissan and Ford have their own equivalent technology, you can no longer do that.

<comment><USER19> When I think of the economics of self driving cars I pull out of my keister a sub $10k price for that option and then estimate the monthly amortization cost at 'under $200/mo'

At that point I start worrying that self driving cars externalize the cost of congestion off the driver to the public at large. Everyone has to deal with congestion except the people inside their self driving cars yapping on their phones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have a first-hand experience: my town created a lot of "binaries", that is, converted pairs of streets into one-way avenues, in order to speed traffic. But now one needs to drive 4x longer to reach the same destination. Even if average speed increased 2x (and it did not), everybody stays on road 2x longer.

<comment><USER21> Making lots of one-way streets is certainly an overused hammer, but it shouldn't double the distance traveled, it should add at most three blocks, and usually far less.

<comment><USER20> Sure, the changes went beyond one-way streets, that was one of the tools; but the final result was, you used to be able to go A to E almost straight, now you need to go A,B,C,D,E.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> One of the biggest reasons I'm looking forward to self-driving cars is to solve the traffic wave[1] problem. These are so unnecessary and deeply frustrating. When I started paying attention to what was causing traffic in the Bay Area I saw them all the time. There's so much added congestion due to erratic speeds, merging too late, rubbernecking and so on.

1) [https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/5tf814/how_one_person...](https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/5tf814/how_one_persons_sudden_brake_can_create_a_wave_of/)

<comment><USER23> The entire point of this article is that doing something to solve the traffic wave problem still won't fix congestion, and is in fact the entire wrong problem to solve!

I think that the article is a great refutation of the value of self-driving cars as a solution to our traffic woes. Self-driving cars optimize the wrong thing, enabling out-size use of miles travelled, and will make us less happy than if we instead optimized for accessibility, as this article argues.

<comment><USER24> As much as its in-vogue thing to push for higher density living some of us dread living close to each other like the plague, for very well founded reasons that have been proven right over and over again.

Our population density (in the United States) is very high as it is in, most metropolitan regions. I'm sure there are perfectly valid reasons for some to want to live in close quarters to one another. But it isn't for everyone given the intense polarization of the American public off late, around even issues that were unchallenged only a few years ago. Unfortunately, there is no end in sight for this development. It's better for everyone to choose to live as they see fit for their safety & security. (Tim Ferriss even cites risk of terrorism for him leaving the Bay area entirely! [1])

Fully autonomous zero-waste cars should be welcomed and not shunned.

[1] I am Tim Ferriss, host of "The Tim Ferriss Show" and author of "Tribe of Mentors." AMA! [https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/7erct8/i_am_tim_ferri...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/7erct8/i_am_tim_ferriss_host_of_the_tim_ferriss_show_and/dq6zrh1/)

<comment><USER17> I think the problem here is you can't have both things. You can't say "I hate other people and want to live away from them" and at the same time say "...but it's also my right to access all the same stuff people who are willing to live near each other have access too".

So, if you want to be a hermit, go for it, but you shouldn't expect the entire world to conform to your concept of what _you_ like even though it's demonstrably less efficient.

<comment><USER25> Why not? If we have the technology to solve that problem is there any reason not to?

<comment><USER26> It's not a solved problem, and it's not just s simple technology problem. It's a problem of getting a large number of people from far-flung suburban or even rural areas into a small urban area, and then back home again.

It's still the last-mile into the city that's going to be congested, and far flung commuters complain about local commuters "Don't make dedicated bus lanes, they slow my car commut!" or "Get those bikes off the road, I'm already driving an hour to get to work, they are slowing me down" or "What do you mean you want me to park outside of the city and take the train, I'm already in my car, I'm not going to go park and then ride a train".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Would love to see a study that examines the level of racial segregation within a city and how it correlates with commute times from suburbs / exurbs into that city.

Segregation, and the lack of resources that go to certain neighborhoods because of it, generally make large swaths of an area undesirable to people who have enough means for options. Dealing with a longer commute seems like a trade-off that many Americans have made given the choice of 'undesirable segregated neighborhood' and 'too rich for my blood'.

</comment><comment><USER28> Seems to me that the article does not get the reason why people move to big cities:

> So what do we achieve by building new highways and speeding up travel? We > don't actually shorten people's trips; we just enable them to live and work > farther away from each other.

If people can live and work farther away while keeping travel time the same, then they have more opportunities for work and leisure in their reachable distance. That is major advantage of living in a big city compared to a small town.

</comment><comment><USER4> > We can always travel more miles at higher speeds to reach the same > stuff—family, friends, jobs, dining, shopping—if technology and cheap energy > enable us to keep spreading out. Heck, some of us might commute to the moon > if we could.

This is where the argument unravels for me. Mobility is obviously preferable to immobility, and family is a great example as to why! It's very rare to have your entire extended family in one city. The ability to keep in contact with people who are far away is an obvious good.

Also, I'm not sure about commuting to the moon (although if it was fast enough, why not?), but it would be cool to visit. The increased ability to travel broadens people's perspectives.

I don't understand why this is the fight they want to have.

<comment><USER29> > Mobility is obviously preferable to immobility, and family is a great > example as to why! It's very rare to have your entire extended family in one > city. The ability to keep in contact with people who are far away is an > obvious good.

That's fine for freeways that people are taking across multiple states. When trips are too long to work as commutes, the level of traffic is low lower and you're immune to induced demand from everyday traffic.

But this is about the roads that get you around a city. If you make those roads a lot wider, but the housing density drops 3x, your ability to visit family doesn't improve at all.

Increasing the distance you can go in 6+ hours broadens horizons. Increasing the distance you can go in 30 minutes inflames sprawl and congestion, unless you have some kind of efficiency miracle to apply to the construction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Increasing the number of lanes of traffic available increases the number of people who can get from A to B using that network during a specific time period.

Whether "congestion" increases or decreases is besides the point. Congestion is definitional in economically successful urban areas.

The trivial example is to imagine a theoretical road with free-flowing traffic and a 10mph speed limit. Add another lane and now twice as many cars can get from A to B (if the demand comes). No individual car will make the journey faster.

</comment><comment><USER31> There are two dimensions under which we can alleviate traffic problems. One is to increase throughput of roads and transportatio, and the other is to increase density and otherwise make efforts to allow people to live closer to their jobs and services they need.

The article would have us believe that only one of these things exists or could be useful, when in fact both can be true and both can help to improve the situation.

<comment><USER21> Both can be true, but if society has already spent a lot on one, than it can be much much more efficient to gather the low hanging fruit on the other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox)

</comment><comment><USER33> >a staggering tripling of the developed land area with zero net population growth

Sounds like a good thing to me. Cramming twenty-six thousand human beings into each square mile of space is every bit as perverse as our modern diet of fat and sugar, or spending sixteen hours a day sitting down staring at a screen.

</comment><comment><USER34> Road traffic is caused by two main things: congestion and bottlenecks.

Congestion is solved by properly designing cities and their transit systems so that there's an optimal ratio of car/bus/train/bike use.

Bottlenecks are solved by properly designing the road network itself so that you don't have situations where 5 lanes become 2, or highway onramps/off-ramps that are too short and cause an entire lane to be backed up by people entering and leaving.

Yes adding more lanes by itself doesn't solve the problem due to induced demand, but refusing to expand highways while simultaneously neglecting to have transit keep up with growth is even worse.

I personally think that all new housing should have a state "transit expansion" tax per unit of housing it introduces, to allow the system to keep up with growth.

<comment><USER35> > I personally think that all new housing should have a state "transit > expansion" tax per unit of housing it introduces, to allow the system to > keep up with growth.

Why not just tax the transit use directly? That way you remove the complexity of determining which new housing is reducing traffic (by letting people commute less) and which housing is increasing traffic by how much.

<comment><USER36> Taxing transit use directly is called a bus ticket.

However when you provide unmetered road usage you also need to provide subsidies to persuade people to use transit, which is what transit taxes do.

<comment><USER35> There are other ways to do road pricing: odometer taxes, toll roads, even fuel taxes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Fixing congestion by speeding up traffic is a red herring. Think of peak usage (rush hour) like pouring a 5-gallon bucket into a sink. The peak volume will always be able to overwhelm the pipe no matter how big the pipe is but a big pipe sure helps it go away faster. This principal applies to mass transit as well. There will always be backup, like on the subway platform at 5:05pm, but more capacity (more lanes, faster flow, more frequent service, etc) means it will cycle through faster.

This article's gripes about measuring the cost of congestion are mostly accurate. That TTI study is laughable. Their gripes about mobility not being a goal are totally bunk. I understand their agenda and why they feel this way but the reduction in cost of moving a fixed distance has enabled us to massively increase our standard of living. They just don't like it because it's made certain other societal problems more bearable so we haven't fixed them yet (e.g. terrible zoning in some places) and it's environmentally unfriendly. Barring some revolution in transportation on par with the automobile I doubt they'll go unfixed that much longer.

I'm not in the least bit sympathetic to the author's belief that increased difficulty of travel is good. I grew up somewhere that was hard to get to and the economic reality that bring sucks (your dollars only go like 80% as far) and people would be stupid to want to impose on this on themselves. The author is conflating his distaste for the automobile (which is fashionable and has some merit,especially on environmental grounds) with a distaste for lower cost/higher speed transportation in general. If you were to re-write his article and instead complain about how city buses and subways have made it possible for people's range to extend beyond their neighborhood or imagine some alternative reality in which cars are replaced with carbon neutral mass transit of equivalent cost/throughput it would become immediately apparent how nonsensical this distaste for reducing the time/money cost of physical distance is.

Edit: My analogy is for reasonable pipe sizes only.

<comment><USER38> > The peak volume will always be able to overwhelm the pipe no matter how big > the pipe

This doesn't make sense? If your sink's pipe was 1 meter in diameter you wouldn't overwhelm it with 5 gallons would you?

Not saying that should be the goal, but the reasoning seems wrong...

<comment><USER39> True, but the point is, making pipes big enough to actually make this work ... is physically impossible with current constraints.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> If the Green New Deal passes, a really interesting consideration would be a bill that would actually require employers to let (or require) employees to work from home a certain number of days a week.

<comment><USER41> Do you have a source or article about that?

I would be interested to see what that means for places where you can't work from home (restaurants, doctor's offices, etc.)

I work from home full time and it's pretty incredible (despite being a little bit lonely.)

<comment><USER40> No because it is my personal idea.

Obviously this is really only relevant for knowledge workers. There would be of course exceptions for anyone who needs to physically be at their workplace to do their job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Huh, nothing about the potential for self driving cars to optimize road usage? Yes, it does require 100% buy in, and it will probably happen in Asia and Europe before the USA, but a fleet of self driving vehicles can theoretically coordinate in ways people can't (not to mention the standard lack of parking needed for taxi-like personal transportation).

But then would people just live even further out, given that even drive time is now free?

</comment><comment><USER43> > very rarely would anyone be willing to spend 6 minutes worth of their wages > (say, on an express toll lane) to avoid that congestion—turns out this has > been studied and people will pay, on average, more like $3 an hour, or well > under minimum wage.

That doesn't quite make sense to me. If someone makes 60k a year (USA GDP per capita) then, roughly speaking, isn't 6 mins of pay for them $3? Most tolls are <= $3 in my experience

<comment><USER18> This doesn't make sense to me either. Most people would gladly spend $3 to save an hour of their life.

<comment><USER26> Express tolls here max out at $10 - I'll pay the $10 if it saves me 30 minutes (the toll signs also give expected travel times for the express (toll) lanes compared to the regular lanes).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Uhhhhhhhh.... Okay let the bridges fall.. let that be on responsibility on the locals? Engineers? As opposed to a trading system that works?

</comment><comment> cadence- Perhaps the solution to traffic is remote work + Starlink? Most of the jobs in downtowns of big cities seem to be office jobs in skyscrapers. Can't most of those people just work from home instead? This would also increase demand for local restaurants and shops to serve all those people working from home.

</comment><comment><USER45> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Fry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Fry) purchased a London cab so that he could use bus and taxi lanes to efficiently drive around London

</comment><comment><USER46> Unstated assumption: living in an inner city is the best way to live; living in the suburbs is worse, and living in a rural area is the worst.

</comment><comment><USER47> It's pretty straightforward logic: if driving places cost you 10 percent less time, would you drive less, or more?

</comment><comment><USER48> How about max-flow min-cut theorem?

<comment><USER49> That assumes complete control of the network. Even one unknown link would break the flow optimisation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> The only way to fix traffic is to fix the problem plaguing virtually every human in the world right now: the inability to be deliberate, focused, and mindful about the task that they're currently engaged in.

Doesn't matter what bandaids we slap on it, more rail, more carpool lanes, wider roads, etc... those are all treatments to the symptoms not the root cause.

I would posit that if people were mindful and conscious about driving, traffic would improve dramatically. Get off your phone. Stop thinking about the emails in your inbox. Don't worry about the dinner date you have tonight. Focus. Drive. Be mindful. Be aware.

<comment><USER51> I find your "solution" hard to put into effect, since most people find driving in traffic to be boring.

<comment><USER50> So by virtue of the fact that traffic is boring, folks have the right to become distracted and put their attention elsewhere?

It's a chicken/egg problem. If people were more focused, there would be less traffic. If there was less traffic, there would be less boredom.

<comment><USER51> Well, yes? You can drive and think about other things–honestly, I wouldn't believe you if you said you _don't_ do this in.</comment></comment></comment></comment>