True, you can ride a bicycle/scooter/etc. or just walk on roads without paying. All motor vehicles pay registration fees if I'm not mistaken. And in at least some states, they hit EVs with higher fees, to make up for lost gas tax revenue. I think some states are even moving towards per-mile fees for EVs, for this purpose. But most road damage is done by big rigs and other heavy vehicles, which are basically all ICE.
It's a tragedy of the commons. For an individual, private car is faster, but the resulting traffic ultimately makes things slower for everyone. Public transit in Tokyo is faster than private cars in car-oriented cities.
That’s not true. Public transit in Tokyo is slower than driving in Dallas or LA. Average one-way commute in LA is just over 30 minutes: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B080ACS006037. For Tokyo it’s 45-60 minutes based on sources I’ve seen online.
As I said on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46214609 , that statistic doesn't mean what you think it does. The article I linked doesn't have figures for Tokyo but it has Shanghai which is comparable; there are around 4x as many jobs within 30 minutes by transit in Shanghai as by car in LA, while the population is only 1.5x bigger.
People in Tokyo will accept a longer commute for the sake of a better job or housing or both, because the commute is less miserable (and also because employers pay commute costs).
> I’m not aware of any transit-oriented city where average commute times are as low in absolute terms as in sprawling, car-dependent American cities.
Transit-oriented cities provide access to more jobs within a fixed range like 30 minutes even for car commuters. https://www.nature.com/articles/s42949-021-00020-2/figures/4 . People in Dallas having shorter commutes isn't a sign that Dallas is built better, it's a sign that people in Dallas are avoiding switching to otherwise better jobs because it would make their commutes worse.
From your article: “The automobile provides better access than transit in all cities we compared, except in Shanghai, China, where automobile reaches about 90% of the jobs reachable by transit at 30 min.”
Yes, that's what a tragedy of the commons looks like. An individual in a given city will have a shorter commute by car. But the more people who are using cars, the worse everyone's commute gets.
The MTA does not overpay when you compare to other employers in central NYC. It's an extremely expensive city due to housing policy failures.
As for commercialising the stations, does the MTA try to do so and fail, or are they forbidden from doing so effectively (often by the same people who are pushing the narrative that there is something wrong with the organisation)?
Almost all rail in Japan is subsidized, directly and indirectly. Yes the single line that is the Tokaido Shinkansen is immensely profitable; even then, JR Central does not pay market-rate interest on even the portion of the construction debt that was not absorbed by the government.
> There is another, I think different, form of "source available" that I've seen a bit lately, similarly from corporate/commercial sponsors: the source code is released under an OSI approved license (e.g. BSD, GPL licence) and the owner maintains and develops the code in an ongoing fashion, but there is no way to easily interface with the developers, contribute changes back to the project, nor is there any public facing bug tracker or developer/user community. To me this is just as much "not open source" as a specific no-compete with the primary project sponsor.
No, that's very much open source - in fact, it was the way most big name open source projects were developed back in the early days. See the famous "the cathedral and the bazaar" essay. Public bug trackers and widely soliciting contributions to mainline are relatively new phenomena, but you always had the right to fork and maintain and share your own fork, and that's the part that's essential.
I agree that it started that way, but that does not mean norms and expectations don't shift. To me, acting like it's 1980 is weird. The majority of maintained open source projects today are single-source-of-truth projects, not source code drops from unreachable invisible teams. There is a reason for that -- it's part of what makes the projects usable and dependable.
I think allowing the definition of open source to be muddled would be a big mistake, especially now that some entities are trying to whittle away users' rights while continuing to benefit from the positive vibes of open source. The OSDI/DFSG/FSF definition is a clear, simple line in the sand that has served the movement very well; there's no reason to change it. Yes some entities actively participate in their community and others do the bare minimum, but it's always going to be possible to be more or less communitarian.
Newer web servers have already moved away from C/C++.
Web browsers have been written in restricted subsets of C/C++ with significant additional tooling for decades at this point, and are already beginning to move to Rust.
For Chrome, I don't know if anyone has compiled the stats, but navigating from https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/... I see at least a bunch of vendored crates, so there's some use, which makes sense since in 2023 they announced that they would support it.
Not in the sense that people who are advocating writing new code in C/C++ generally mean. If someone is advocating following the same development process as Chrome does, then that's a defensible position. But if someone is advocating developing in C/C++ without any feature restrictions or additional tooling and arguing "it's fine because Chrome uses C/C++", no, it isn't.
New high-scale data infrastructure projects I am aware of mostly seem to be C++ (often C++20). A bit of Rust, which I’ve used, and Zig but most of the hardcore stuff is still done in C++ and will be for the foreseeable future.
It is easy to forget that the state-of-the-art implementations of a lot of systems software is not open source. They don’t struggle to attract contributors because of language choices, being on the bleeding edge of computer science is selling point enough.
There's a "point of no return" when you start to struggle to hire anyone on your teams because no one knows the language and no one is willing to learn. But C++ is very far from it.
There's always someone willing to write COBOL for the right premium.
I'm working on Rust projects, so I may have incomplete picture, but I'm from what I see when devs have a choice, they prefer working with Rust over C++ (if not due to the language, at least due to the build tooling).
Writing C++ is easier than writing Rust. But writing safe multithreaded code in C++?
I don't want to write multithreaded C++ at all unless I explicitly want a new hole in my foot. Rust I barely have any experience with, but it might be less frustrating than that.
Anecdotally, my "wow, this Rust business might really go somewhere" moment was when I tried adding multithreading to a random tool I made (dispatching tasks to new threads).
Multithreading had not been planned or architected for, it took 30 min, included the compiler informing me I couldn't share a hashmap with those threads unsynchronised, and informing me on how to fix it.
I've had similar experience when the compiler immediately found unsynchronized state deep inside a 3rd party library I've been using. It was a 5-minute fix for what otherwise could have been mysterious unreproducible data corruption.
These days even mobile phones have multicore CPUs, so it's getting hard to find excuses for single-threaded programs.
Game development, graphics and VFX industry, AI tooling infrastructure, embedded development, Maker tools like Arduino and ESP32, compiler development.
> ... has a debug allocator that maintains memory safety in the face of use-after-free and double-free
which is probably true (in that it's not possible to violate memory safety on the debug allocator, although it's still a strong claim). But beyond that there isn't really any current marketing for Zig claiming safety, beyond a heading in an overview of "Performance and Safety: Choose Two".
It is intended for release builds. The ReleaseSafe target will keep the checks. ReleaseFast and ReleaseSmall will remove the checks, but those aren't the recommended release modes for general software. Only for when performance or size are critical.
This mostly commuters and tradesmen. You aren’t going to get your tools on the train, snd you are driving into the city from white plains or somewhere similar.
The alternative is the tradesmen can now apply their trade for 30 minutes more each way rather than sit in traffic (probably better overall) That, and apparently they and their kids can breathe easier.
The congestion tax has far more impact on people who live and work above 60th or in the outer boroughs or NJ than it does Manhattanites. Retail, wholesale, trades, small businesses and yes commuters in these areas, which are poorer than Manhattan, suffer disproportionately
The 2.90 is even capped at $34 per week. Then there's the 50% discount for low-income NYC residents who qualify and apply for the Fair Fares NYC program, or for anyone regadless of residence who qualifies for reduced fares through age or a qualifying disability.
Both of these numbers are changing in early January to $3 and $35 respectively, but same idea.
Still, some European countries like Germany offer far cheaper than this, while others like the UK are probably pricer. NYC public transit gives very good value for the US at least.
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