Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | solatic's comments login

Cities can replace smooth asphalt with rough brick and cobblestone, and replace traffic lights with traffic circles / roundabouts. If they really want to force cars to slow down, they could, in a way that doesn't take anyone's rights away and doesn't require any vehicle manufacturer to play ball.

Freedom isn't free. It's always cheaper to take away people's freedom instead of doing the hard work of building infrastructure to naturally promote traffic calming. Too bad America (left and right) doesn't believe in freedom anymore.


Yes, lets just reorganize and rebuilt the entire city infrastructure to fix bad behavior by a few people. I don't want to actually oppose your suggestions because I think they are all good, but I also think that if a person repeatedly breaks a law then that is precisely the circumstances under which their freedom can be decreased as long as due process is respected.

American's still believe in freedom, in my opinion, its just that the entrenched powers make it increasingly impossible to imagine a world that actually nourishes human freedom and, lacking that, we just sort of flail around in frustration. The single insight which Americans must digest in order to move forward is that both governments and corporations and, indeed, any powerful entity whatsoever, can and often do interfere with human freedom and flourishing and all of them need to be continuously attended to and restrained by law and by the vigilance of the people. The second most important thing is the understanding that negative freedoms mean nothing without the resources to transform them into positive freedoms and if we fail to provide those resources then enormous amounts of human potential will be wasted. The second is a harder pill to swallow given the U.S. mythology, but I would be satisfied with the former for now.


You should look into why cities use smooth asphalt over concert which would be significantly less maintenance.

Cars driving around create a lot of noise. Driving on a rough surface like concert, let alone a bumpy surface like brick or cobblestone, creates a ton of additional noise. Another hint is that gravel driveways are cheap, but they also make it very very easy to hear when someone is pulling up to your house.

Anyone living next to these roads _might_ have some cars go a bit slower, but at the cost of not being able to sleep at night.

Then there is the fact that America loves big cars with big off roading wheels. I think the assumption here is that most speeders would be discouraged by the uncomfortable ride, however I think reality is that the people in that hummer going 90mph on a city street just won't care about a rougher ride.


They added concrete and metal bollards that narrows the road around crosswalks here. It's made a nice difference.

If you also want to encourage biking, don't replace your asphalt with cobblestone. Maybe more speed bumbs and traffic slowing curves.

just pave the bike lane

That's a possible solution to the problem of cars in general going too fast for a given area.

That is not the problem Virginia is trying to deal with with this legislation. They are trying to deal with the problem of a very small number of drivers who are driving much faster than the speed limit and much faster than even most speeders go.

These are drivers that have been convicted of speeding at more than 100 mph. That is a criminal offense of the same level as drunk driving rather than a mere traffic infraction.

It is just those drivers that they are trying to slow down.


This the wrong way. It will destroy suspensions at 5-10x the regular rate and not everyone can afford a new suspension every 5 years.

Bricks and cobblestones don’t handle high traffic well, require too much maintenance i.e. too expensive. Cobblestones are only good for areas with heavily restricted or banned vehicle traffic. For roads and higher traffic streets, asphalt is more practical.

Agree with the rest of your comment. I also think the main reason for high traffic deaths in America is road design.


"Cities can replace smooth asphalt with rough brick and cobblestone"

There are some cobblestone streets in Prague and cars driving through them, even slowly, generate a lot of unnecessary noise.

Count me out, I don't want to suffer from extra noise just because it would slow some people down. I lived in one such street for years and even with sporadic traffic, I had to open my windows at night. I hated that.


You mean the historic city center? Pretty sure that's not exactly state of the art

This place: https://maps.app.goo.gl/hfDcJek99whs9Ghu8

Cobblestone is an old technology, though. How does "state of the art" differ from what we can see on this street view?


I think someone can drive 80km/h on this one. Plus they should be super-slippery in rain, right?

I remember crossing Poland towards Lithuania some years back, and in some village 1h from the border had a 500m part with stones, and those stones used would force me to do 25-30km/h and not more, I feared that my tires would burst, also the noise was unbearable.


There are different personas in this space with different needs. It sounds like you're trying to reach the User who is currently doing ClickOps in cloud consoles to help set up their initial infrastructure and is subsequently getting lost.

Your risks include: (1) if the User is not proficient with Terraform and similar tools, will they appreciate being given Terraform code that they don't know how to deal with, and the additional overhead compared to just, well, ClickOps'ing their way through cloud consoles, particularly since ClickOps is a fundamentally free product? (2) If the User is proficient with Terraform, won't they already have some ideas in mind about how to modularize their codebase for long-term maintainability? How do you address the "too many resources take too long to plan" problem?

What you're describing is cool but I'm wondering who your target persona is, what value you provide above just ClickOps or running terraform plan locally, and whether that value solves enough of a pain point that people will be willing to pay?


I find it ironic that a project using Supabase declared Supabase dead (if you press F to pay respects, you get an error message that their Supabase is hammered and try again later).

That would be a great argument if Python wasn't a language that let you reach into the internals and define __str__() for things you shouldn't be defining it for. And that is something people will definitely do because, you know, they just need something to friggin work so they can get whatever ticket closed and keep some metric happy tracking time-to-close

Programmers being lazy and shit at their jobs is not a reason to not improve the language.

> It just has to be cheaper than you

There's an ocean of B2B SaaS services that would save customers money compared to building poor imitations in-house. Despite the Joel Test (almost 25 years old! craxy...) asking whether you buy your developers the best tools that money can buy, because they're almost invariably cheaper than developer salaries, the fact remains that most companies treat salaries as a fixed cost and everything else threatens the limited budget they have.

Anybody who has ever tried to sell developer tooling knows, you're competing with free/open-source solutions, and it aint a fair fight.


Or, you can write an actual shell script file (i.e. with a .sh extension) to be stored in your repository, ADD it in a throwaway context (i.e. multi-stage builds), then RUN --mount=type=bind to put it into a temporary directory in the build container so that you can execute it. This way, the script doesn't pollute the container, and you have proper separation of concerns, including the ability to use library functions, running shell linters directly, or using higher-level languages like Python if you really need it for some reason


That's bad practice because it hides build steps from `docker inspect`. Per https://github.com/docker-library/official-images#clarity:

> Try to make the Dockerfile easy to understand/read. It may be tempting, for the sake of brevity, to put complicated initialization details into a standalone script and merely add a RUN command in the Dockerfile. However, this causes the resulting Dockerfile to be overly opaque, and such Dockerfiles are unlikely to pass review. Instead, it is recommended to put all the commands for initialization into the Dockerfile as appropriate RUN or ENV command combinations. To find good examples, look at the current official images.


That's advice specifically for official images, and it dates back before multi-stage builds. Most people are not building official images. Most people benefit from clear encapsulation and separation of concerns. The Dockerfile sets up the environment to run the provisioning script, and a provisioning script does the actual provisioning. Official images are different because usually the provisioning script is hidden in an OS package installed with e.g. apk add (or are we going to pretend that OS packages are bad practice for the same reason?).


Don't multi-stage builds already break `docker inspect`?


Not OP, and also not a web server genius, but I read OP's comment as allowing server administers to write policy in OPA then just using https://github.com/microsoft/regorus/ to determine whether to allow or forbid the connection. The web server author can clearly document what is available in input/data to be checked against in the policy. Is it really more complicated than that?


I honestly don't know. I'm in the same place as you: not a web server expert. But I did spend a bunch of time in security a while ago, so maybe it's my own bias to be sceptical of anyone who casually suggests building and implementing their own boundary security solutions.

As well as that, the idea that the language any software is written in is largely irrelevant, especially in the context of performance, is not at all obvious or intuitive to me. I get that it would look that way if you reduce a web server down its core functionality. But that also is a common mistake in educated but inexperienced early career software engineers.

I don't know this stuff, but I know enough to know how well I don't know this stuff. I'm trying to work out if the stuff I'm reading is from someone who I should learn from, or if it's from someone with a lot of confidence but limited experience. It could be either, I'm sincerely on the fence, but a git repo of their web server would help clear it up for me personally.

> Is it really more complicated than that?

I can't say without really doing a thorough review. Even if regorus is 100% reliable rules engine, my understanding is it's a rules engine. I assume there's still a bunch of custom integration needed to manage and source the rules, feed them to the engine, and then implement the result effectively and safely across the web server. It can be done quickly and easily, but to consider everything and be confident it's done correctly and securely? I don't think that can be done trivially by the average human without some compromise.


People are rarely willing to adopt 10% improvements. Every improvement, no matter how small, needs to be taught to the larger community of users and other stakeholders; it is relatively rare for you to be the sole stakeholder, and thus the cost of adopting the improvement is rarely worth the improvement itself, endangering making improvements. Only 10x-style improvements have a good chance of widescale adoption. Thinking that you can short-circuit this by passing 10% improvements in widely adopted languages is the mark of someone who never tried to get language features like the "var" keyword adopted in multi-million-line Java codebases.


> The obvious solution is... for the government to lower the cost of high-quality education

Not everyone is smart enough to land in the professional class. The US does its young population an enormous disservice by pushing low academic performers to go to college. There needs to be, somehow, a way for people to make a living with their hands, because for some people, that is genuinely all they are capable of.

> ... build out social systems...

The way you build out the social system is by enabling people in the working class to find genuine work that produces value, not some ditch-digging make-work government program. You don't take those jobs away by offshoring them.

I'm not saying I'm against offshoring in general or that I support Trump's tariffs - I don't. But it's not exactly controversial to point out that, since the end of the Cold War, the US prioritized the recommendations of economists over social cohesion and socially harmonious policy. A lot of people were thrown out of work and were left to fend for themselves. Many of them ended up as victims of the opioid epidemic. I'm not convinced that the prior system was completely peaches as cream.


> by enabling people in the working class to find genuine work that produces value, not some ditch-digging make-work government program

Like building out clean energy infrastructure?

Modern "ditch digging government programs" aren't necessarily low-skill. Even at the time, the new deal government programs were massively beneficial for society while also providing jobs for folks who needed it, at reasonable wages. Let's not shit on good government programs just because the right has been feeding us propaganda demonizing it for decades.


Building out clean energy infrastructure provides value. That's perfectly fine. There is plenty of need for hands to maintain American road infrastructure that is falling apart and build new infrastructure like high-speed intercity rail and more subway lines to help support additional population growth.

The reference is to how a government can pay people to literally dig ditches then refill them. This nominally increases GDP (due to additional government expenditure) but it does not produce value and, more importantly, does not give people the dignity they would ordinarily achieve through their labor because they know such work is bullshit.


Never heard of anyone getting paid to do anything like digging ditches and refilling them; is this a real problem?


What happened to the information economy? And getting everyone trained on that type of skills? Nowadays education seems to be frowned upon by those in charge.

Edit: looks like this is discussed in a sibling thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43573036


The "move" from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy didn't end agriculture being a significant part of the national economy; agriculture just lost relative share of GDP. Similarly, the "move" to an information or services economy isn't necessarily going to eliminate either agricultural or industrial work. China, for example, has its tech giants (Tencent, Alibaba, etc.) but it also has vast industrial capacity (e.g. Shenzhen) and agricultural capacity (e.g. the largest pork production in the world). American education deciding to push children towards information-economy jobs that were a poor fit for their talents, neglecting classes like shop skills that were once common, was a mistake and certainly not inevitable.


"move" absolutely did move a lot of workforce, since farmers are much more productive, not as much help is needed.


A lot, but not all. The problem is that educational programs focusing on agriculture and manufacturing skills were eliminated in many school districts, rather than simply downsized to make room in the budget for information-economy education. By not offering these options at all, many children were pushed to positions that they were ill-suited for, often resulting in professional failure at best and at worst, large college debt that they would not be able to service without the expected parallel high-salary professional job.


Author thinks they are the lone person stuck in the middle between two tribes, but actually they are part of a third tribe that fallaciously believes that it is possible to write better policy, if only we took the time to study reality more and listen to more people and apply more reason etc. In short, Author distinguishes between the two established tribes (in which people make a very limited emotional engagement with the issues) and their tribe (in which people make a stronger emotional engagement). This is a fallacy because:

  * It is not reasonable to expect most people to make strong emotional investments into voting choices that have little direct effect on their lives, and indeed we have a representative democracy rather than a direct democracy to recognize that reality 
  * Reality is far, far more complicated than can be summarized in journalism or articles; many researchers spend their entire careers attempting to learn deeply about *one* area, let alone many areas; much pertinent information is non-public. Policies that are effective in one community are completely counter-productive in another. Believing that you are The Exception and that you Know The Right Way To Run The Country because you "do your research" is the height of hubris.
People will seek out good leadership. People will switch leaders when their current leadership fails to make them happy. Good leaders defer to experts, each in their own domain, who may make imperfect decisions and other mistakes but nonetheless make well-intentioned efforts to improve over time and pass on their knowledge so that future generations can learn from their mistakes. All else is natural variance due to human imperfection.


Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: