Obviously all of what dang said, but I want to add that I think timing is an additional factor.
If you post when silicon valley wakes up on a weekday, you might get “initial” points faster, which leads to your submission being ranked higher up for a while and being more discoverable.
That (\/) (;,,;) (\/) I’m helping! feeling upon discovering a mod has bumped one of your 04:00 UTC “oh, this is interesting” posts that nobody else saw.
It is mostly within budget, estimated in 2005 were 5.5 billion €, total cost as of today are 5.9 billion €, the difference being largely attributed to the pandemic and later addition of sections.
Sure, I'm just pointing out that this article doesn't follow the HN Guidelines, so I was confused at not seeing any mention of the budget within the article:
> "Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important."
> "Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize"
Considering the original title is just the name of the railway, and I do not think “within budget” is editorializing, I think the commenter is being overly pedantic
I opened the article expecting to see news about the budget and how they stayed within it, since that SEEMS like the biggest surprising news in a project like this. How is that overly pedantic?
I understand your expectation. That said, I think it's ok to add detail in commentary when the article doesn't mention it explicitly. So continuing to go upon the point that the article didn't mention the budget makes you seem as pedantic.
Does the site mention the budget and completion time/cost at all? I can't find it from a quick browse/search of the site. It's taking editorializing to a whole new level to add details that are not in the linked article or site at all.
The right thing to do in this case is find the best source for this information (about the budget, schedule and completion time/cost) and make that the URL of the submission. Please email us the best links you know of about this (hn@ycombinator.com) and we'll consider updating the URL.
The site doesn‘t mention it, I got that information from various german announcements. I fear there probably won‘t be an English announcement regarding the budget, though there will be many regarding the tunnel.
€5.5 billion in 2005 is €8 billion in 2025, so it can be either over or under budget depending on how you amortize the costs over the construction period.
To contrast, HS2 here in the UK has cost £40 billion (€45 billion) to date with a further £25 billion (€28 billion) allocated, for a largely superterranean route of 230km.
As badly as HS2 has been run, apart from the tunnel length (where HS2 has not too much more than this project) these projects are night and day different. Not just that HS2 Phase 1a/1b is almost double the length and significantly higher design speed (360km/h vs 250km/h), but they are in a different league in terms of civil engineering from the info I can see - this seems to have less than 80 structures (overpasses, bridges, underpasses etc.) whereas HS2 has 175 bridges and 52 viaducts, and some of those are massive (including the longest railway viaduct in the UK).
HS2 also includes major stations - a 6 platform one almost entirely underground in west london, a multi-platform extension in central london, a new station in central birmingham, a new 4 platform outside of Birmingham
Not necessarily because no one lives underground and there are probably no existing things like property, gas lines, electricity lines, sewers, pipelines, roads, etc to avoid or reroute. And very little in the way of habitat.
The longest road tunnel in the world only cost about 100 million in the 90s for 25km so tunneling isn't always a gigantic Big Dig style clusterfuck.
In terms of legal complexity, it's fantastically easier than picking your way across and near thousands of individual plots of very expensive land owned by people with solicitors salivating at the potential fees, expensive private infrastructure, nature reserves and so on.
> The longest road tunnel in the world only cost about 100 million in the 90s for 25km so tunneling isn't always a gigantic Big Dig style clusterfuck.
Big Dig style clusterfuck is because the simplicity and cheapness you're talking about only apply to tunnels through mountains, less so to those underwater and definitely not to tunnels under big cities i.e. land that people live on, which comes with all the complexity.
Yes, and the Austrian route is mostly in that category under the Koralpe Massif rather then the very politically awkward Home Counties (NIMBY Central, and very rich NIMBYs at that).
Hence why tunneling does not necessarily mean a stunningly expensive project. We just hear about the HS2s and Big Digs because they reverberate for decades with all the legal battles.
The big dig is probably the last major success of American infrastructure. Referring to it as a clusterfuck is representative of why we'll never get another one.
Even if the end result ends up being a net positive, even by a wide margin, I think any project that goes over budget by 100% and lands 10 years late does reasonably merit the clusterfuck tag.
The Space Shuttle was one too and that was a marvel. A deathtrap politically-motivated pork-barrel hot-mess of a project, but also a shining black-and-white marvel of a glorious flying space Aga.
> The Space Shuttle was one too and that was a marvel. A deathtrap politically-motivated pork-barrel hot-mess of a project, but also a shining black-and-white marvel of a glorious flying space Aga.
The big dig directly benefits people producing value many, many, many times what the investment cost. Who gives a shit about the initial investment? Voters have proven time and time again that it's easier to lie to them than to get them to earnestly think.
IT is also correct - it costs way too much for what we got. It will be nice for future generations that don't have to pay for it, but it doesn't look like a good investment. Now if the costs were more reasonable it could be a great investment.
I don't see how you're justifying this. Yes the costs overran, but the investment would have been worth it at 4x the end cost. It made boston one of the nicest cities in the country, even if it still sucks ass to drive in.
The costs overran by a lot. Enough that my tiny city in the middle of nowhere would not benefit even though if the costs has been more reaonable we could get something. It might be worth it for Boston - I don't live there, but for a large number of places it makes such a large project something we will never do. The investment at a reasonable price would be wroth for more because it allows similar investments elsewhere and so the total pay off would be much higher.
I live way out in the bumfuck of nowhere, way west of western mass. It's still obvious the big dig was worth it at 4x the cost it actually ran. Yes, even though my taxpayer dollars haven't returned to me in any way I can straightforwardly estimate or point to.
Of course, the big dig is no excuse to not invest outside of the Boston metro area. But that's a completely different argument than saying the investment wasn't worth it.
> The investment at a reasonable price would be wroth for more because it allows similar investments elsewhere and so the total pay off would be much higher.
This is an insane way to reason about investments. No wonder this country is such a shithole. Obviously we should do similar big-dig style investments outside of Boston. Obviously investments like the big dig prompt investments nearby. But individualistic assholes like you force us all to commit suicide instead because you can't use your fucking brain to connect why investment now means we all eat good later.
Would be interesting to read how the Austrian project was contracted out? It seems in the UK the big construction companies have got very good in extracting a lot of money from customers, wonder if things were different in Austria with this project.
Interesting. In UK, I think the big construction companies would hire these bean-counters then use them to out-manoeuvre the ones that are hired to replace them. Quickly nobody knows what a reasonable price is, and the govmnt has to go with choice of one out of two overpriced bids. (I have no direct experience, this is just what it looks like from an observers perspective)
Obviously this does not give any indication of the complexity of each project. Tunnelling and building railway through a metropolis I would imagine is quite challenging.
Still seems insanely more expensive in the UK. I understand they have a higher cost to carry because their project is indeed more complex, but that's like a almost 13x more expensive variant, while not even being two times the length.
> It is mostly within budget, estimated in 2005 were 5.5 billion €, total cost as of today are 5.9 billion €
That’s incredible! The project managers and contractors should collaborate on a book about how they did it. Heh staying on budget should be the norm and not the exception but irl a 20 year large infra project coming in that close is something to celebrate and learn from.
Started in 1998, apparently without a budget, which came 7 years later, and was completed within…mostly…budget, but not really since it was 7% over budget.
Which also begs the question; why is a railway project page on HN at all, regardless of anything else?
"Willison’s insight was that this isn’t just a filtering problem; it’s architectural. There is no privilege separation, and there is no separation between the data and control paths. The very mechanism that makes modern AI powerful - treating all inputs uniformly - is what makes it vulnerable. The security challenges we face today are structural consequences of using AI for everything."
Attributing that to Simon when people have been writing articles about that for the last year and a half doesn't seem fair. Simon gave that view visibility, because he's got a pulpit.
Longer, surely? (Though I don't have any evidence I can point to).
It's in-band signalling. Same problem DTMF, SS5, etc. had. I would have expected the issue to be intuitvely obvious to anyone who's heard of a blue box?
(LLMs are unreliable oracles. They don't need to be fixed, they need their outputs tested against reality. Call it "don't trust, verify").
One interesting thing that most non-systems programmers don’t know is that memory and cpu performance have improved at completely different rates. That’s a large part of why we have x times faster CPUs but software is still slow.
The systems people worry more about memory usage for this reason, and prefer manual memory management.
> ... memory and cpu performance have improved at completely different rates.
This is overly simplified. To a first approximation, bandwidth has kept track with CPU performance, and main memory latency is basically unchanged. My 1985 Amiga had 125ns main-memory latency, though the processor itself saw 250ns latency - current main memory latencies are in the 50-100ns range. Caches are what 'fix' this discrepancy.
You would need to clarify how manual memory management relates to this... (cache placement/control? copying GCs causing caching issues? something else?)
Moore's Law has been dead for a long time. The doubling rate of transistors is now drastically below Moore's prediction.
We're adding transistors at ~18%/year. That's waaaaay below the ~41% needed to sustain Moore's law.
Even the "soft" version of Moore's law (a description of silicon performance vs. literally counting transistors) hasn't held up. We are absolutely not doubling performance every 24 months at this point.
Moore's law has kind of ended already though, and maybe has done for a few years, and even if you can make a chip which is faster there's a basic thermodynamics problem running it at full tilt for any meaningful period of time. I would have expected that to have impacted software development, and I don't think it particularly has, and there's also no obvious gain in e.g. compilers or other optimization which would have countered the effect.
Probably architecture changes (x86 has a lot of historic baggage that difficults newer designs) and also more specialized hardware in the CPU, probably this might also be one of the reasons Apple went this way with the M Silicon
But the machines aren't really "faster" in clock speed— for a long time now the gains have been in better and more local caching + parallelism at both the core and instruction level.
Static type checking and Gleam can compile to JavaScript. Gleam and Elixir can be mixed in the same project too, so it’s easy to start adding Gleam to an elixir code base or use Elixir libraries in Gleam.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by "not as integrated as in Gleam"?
Are you referring to Hologram being a framework/library rather than a language-level feature? Or is it more about the developer experience - like tooling, compilation workflow, or how seamlessly it fits into the Elixir ecosystem compared to Gleam's native JS transpilation?
I'd love to understand your perspective better so we can potentially improve that integration feel!
In german the usual saying in meetings is, literally translated „I can‘t say anything about that (optional: at the present moment)“.
That sentence is widely accepted as a substitute for „I don‘t know“, but at the same time doesn‘t hold the same conclusion, since there could be a myriad of reasons why you can‘t say anything about a topic.
Oh wow, never looked at ISO8601 durations before and I had no idea they were this ugly. Please, no, don't make me deal with ISO8601. I'd rather write a number of seconds or a format like 'X weeks' or 'Y hours Z minutes'x ISO8601 looks exclusively like a data interchange format
I learned it too. It's just ugly. Before I looked at the relevant section of the ISO 8601 duration format yesterday, I didn't know it. After I looked at it, I now know it, and I strongly dislike it.
Apart from the reasons for this block: Why do these decisions always have to be black and white. I believe it would benefit mental health if Facebook was blocked one day per week so people are forced to live a day without it.
Same with combustion vehicles and the climate: block cars in cities a couple of days per week, individually selected per person.
> Why do these decisions always have to be black and white.
This decision seems to be very different than that. Those companies were asked to "provide a local contact, grievance handler and person responsible for self-regulation", otherwise be blocked.
It really isn't surprising that someone asks them to follow the laws of their country, and if the companies are ignoring them, block them since they're unable to follow the local laws.
The companies really forced Nepal's hand here by repeatedly ignoring their requests.
Plus, if it was a 'grey' punishment like a fine... these companies have billions if not trillions, they would just pay them, OR pay their army of lawyers to stall, fight, and try to overturn the decisions. Because an army of lawyers is still cheaper than an EU scale fine.
Why should well behaving people be punished for the actions of those who aren't?
These sorts of suggestions always remind me of the various people who, during my teen years, loved to give unsolicited advice suggesting that if my parents didn't apply arbitrary restrictions to my hobbies, they'd be setting me up for failure (my hobby was teaching myself higher level math, gpu programming etc, things that led to my current career).
Day restrictions for vehicles can be temporarily worthwhile when the air quality becomes too poor or as a transitory step towards a more significant ban and restructuring of thr city's transportation systems. But if kept in-place as-is long term, they just lead to people finding workarounds (like second cars).
> Why should well behaving people be punished for the actions of those who aren't?
I don't think it's a punishment so much as a public health measure. Like restricting who can buy tobacco and alcohol and where they can be consumed, or car pollution regulations.
If that's how low your bar is for where government should interfere with people's daily lives under the guise of public health, we might as well also ask for restrictions on how much food people are allowed to buy, and mandatory daily exercise.
Yeah, definitely agree there's a ton of room for disagreement on the topic.
Where I'm coming from is, I think social media is one of, if not the top most, destructive forces in society today. It provides a huge megaphone for people who benefit from spreading misinformation and actively encourages conspiratorial thinking. The attention- and ad-based business model rewards the worst kind of communication, and we can see how quickly it has been abused to destroy our society. Being one of the worst inventions in human history is not a "low bar."
I don't know what the fix is, but I know that the current situation is very much not working. I'd like it if we tried some kind of regulation to reign in this poison we are all collectively consuming. Again, something similar to how we regulate other harmful substances like alcohol and tobacco. We don't need to outright ban it, but we need to do something.
I agree with your intention, I'm just not a fan of arbitrary measures like a one-day ban.
I'd rather see targeted actions, say, bans or severe restrictions on recommendation systems/algorithmic feeds. Limit how far they're allowed to reach from your personal network of follows, limit the percentage of posts that can be algorithmicly driven, controls on the balance of popular posts vs relevant posts, ban infinite scrolling feeds, limit how strongly sites may neuter their search systems, maybe require warnings after certain levels of continuous usage.
If the goal is to directly and forcibly limit usage, a "credit" system would be preferable, you have some weekly time allocation for large-scale social media usage (forums were technically social media, but were far healthier than platforms like reddit, facebook, X), and you can use that allocation however you want. Your allocation can grow kr shrink based on your specific circumstances (career, history of healthy use of social media, social circumstances like living far from family, medical circumstances).
IIRC Paris has done something that in the past - you could only drive in the city on certain days depending on the registration of your car (even vs odd numbers).
The panny-D was great for that, early days saw stuff like clean air in China, India, wildlife coming into the cities, clean water in Venice, etc - and that was after only a few weeks.
We've had car-free sundays in the past a few times, but that was also due to oil crises. But also, a lot of inner cities have a ban on cars, a restriction on cars (only locals and suppliers at fixed times), or environmental zones (no older Diesel engines, some are going a step further and banning all vans and trucks, promoting electric alternatives for last-mile deliveries). They're all having a significant impact on the health and liveability of city centers.
But it makes a lot of sense too, as they're 1000 year old city centers that were never designed for cars anyway. Often the only roads that can support cars at a normal in-city speed are on the outside of where city walls used to be.
Anyway, speaking for myself, I haven't used FB in forever, I don't think a blanket pause would affect most people that much, I posit it's only a small minority that falls into the problematic FB usage category.
Agreed. These services offer a lot of valuable social infrastructure, and it would be nice to keep the good and stop the bad.
On a personal level I do something like this on my home router by adding latency to specific websites and I totally recommend this to anyone trying to cut the habit. A few hundred ms of extra latency can really kill the doomscroll’s grip while still giving you access to messages from friends. Doing this is also not too hard to configure using a pi hole and some vibe networking.
I have personally seen a couple family members go more than a little nuts on fb, and I've been stalked there. It is poison for some.
Reminescent of cigarette smoking a few decades ago. "Everyone" was smoking so it was okay. Now they walk around with portable oxygen generators. If they can still walk.
I hadn't thought of the comparison to tobacco yet, but it's great. I wonder if social media will follow a similar trajectory, of going from the cool thing everyone picks up to a lame addicting health-destroyer. Thankfully, it's way easier to quit Facebook than smoking.
The comparison of social media to tobacco is almost too perfect. It feels good while you're doing it and can be an effective social tool, but leaves you feeling like shit when you stop and has disastrous long-term health consequences.
Yes! I read commentary a while back that said the size of the phone is roughly (w/in a factor of two) the size of a cigarette pack and just like the pack, is almost always within arm's reach and frequently sought.
Can't recall the exact source, but the conclusion of the article was: if you want to kick the phone habit, first of all, keep it out of arm's reach.
> An AI Model designed to match my tone and be sycophantic to my every whim. It would have killed me.
Matching tones and being sycophantic to every whims. Just like many really bad therapists. Only they are legally responsible if they cause a death, which makes them care (apart from compassion and morality).
The criminal justice system is also a system for preventing individuals who perform unwanted action from doing them again.
You can’t punish AI for messing up. You would need to pull it out of circulation on each major screw up, which isn’t financially feasible, and you would need to make it want to prevent that.
Take a step back and think about what the Model told that Teenager. It told him to specifically hide his behaviour from people who would have tried to prevent it and get him help.
There is no comparison to therapists. Because a therapist would NEVER do that unless wanting to cause harm.
> Only they are legally responsible if they cause a death, which makes them care
I see this kind of cynicism often on this site and I frankly find it inexplicable. It doesn't seem warranted. The vast majority of therapists clearly care about their patients.
On the other hand, people often don't give a shit about laws, even to their own detriment.
People are a lot more complicated than "I adjust behavior to maximize personal outcome in terms of $$, beep bop". In some cases we respond to incentives, of course, but having that be the only law to explain human behavior is patently ridiculous.
> I see this kind of cynicism often on this site and I frankly find it inexplicable. It doesn't seem warranted. The vast majority of therapists clearly care about their patients.
I find the the view cynic as well, that's why I wrote "apart from compassion and morality", which you failed to include in your quote.
I find Stallmans views are best summed up by this quote from him:
“I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place.”
If you post when silicon valley wakes up on a weekday, you might get “initial” points faster, which leads to your submission being ranked higher up for a while and being more discoverable.
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