Hawaii Highways | Hacker News Reader

Hawaii Highways

hawaiihighways.com

75 pointsyakattak35 comments

There's a certain irony in the idea that Hawaii has interstates, given that it's an archipelago. It's great that H1, H2, and H3 exist, and Hawaii deserves the same road funding as any other state. But there's some lesson about naming conventions, or emergent properties, or maybe something else to be had here for sure.

Alaska also has interstates, although they are not built to mainland standards. (Hawaii's are. Hawaii is much more densely populated than Alaska.)

I presume in Alaska's case, at least, it's a funding technicality. As you said, the roads are not built to interstate standards (with a few exceptions around Fairbanks and Anchorage, maybe). For example, without prior knowledge, no one is going to guess that the AlCan is an interstate, as there aren't even any signs indicating such.

I would imagine the (anti-road) weather in alaska might be more extreme (maintenance-heavy) than the continental united states.

Not sure how the hawaiian interstate fares against the environment - could be low-maintenance, could be daily ocean+lava attacks.

The interstate highway system is actually made up of Interstate and Defense Highways. So all the "interstates" in Hawaii are actually Defense Highways that connect Pearl Harbor with other military bases on Oahu.

- The H-1 goes from Barbers Point to Pearl Harbor to Diamond Head.

- The H-2 connects Pearl Harbor with Schofield Barracks.

- The H-3 connects Pearl Harbor with MCBH (Marine Corps Base Hawaii) at Kaneohe.

TIL. Thanks for this context!

That website is a crazy labor of love. Pretty dope! Nice work

Sidenote, driving from Kona Airport south ( big Island) at night is one of the scariest things I have done with all the winding turns and hairpin like turns as well. Reminds me of the video games of need for speed, racing on a cliff. Basically, you need to be extremely careful at night on a single lane road with limited visibility and or bring glasses so that you are prepared to be blinded by other drivers's headlights.

Exact same sentiment - scariest drive I’ve done, but this was in Maui, diving back from Hana at night. I’ve never driven in such pitch black darkness before with hairpin turns.

This is awesome, and a nice trip down memory lane for when I lived in Hawai'i.

Looks like the last update was in January 2014 though.

Oscar Voss was updating some of xyr other pages as recently as 2018.

* http://alaskaroads.com/home.html

Looks like this one [0] has an implied update in 2023, as thats the latest listed road trip.

Seems he just doesn't have anything to update on some of the pages.

0: http://alaskaroads.com/roadgeek-superlatives.htm

I love this design!

Apple should learn some UX lessons from this

peak web design.

Peak page load performance too

Nonresponsive, low contrast, and unusable on mobile so not really. This is very 1999 design

Works just fine on my Samsung S23 with Brave.

“Works” as in the page loads, sure. That’s not a good metric

>Nonresponsive, low contrast, and unusable on mobile

Like I said.

As much as I enjoy dunking on the various annoying fads in contemporary web design, it’s easy to make an identical mistake in the opposite direction and romanticize the past too much. This page is close to unusable: the low-contrast black-on-green text is hard to read, the click targets are tiny, and it doesn’t work at all at mobile.

I don’t really blame the site creator because it seems like this hasn’t been updated in a long time, but I want to push back on your attitude. We can embrace usability without giving in to web slop.

It's the textured background that screws it. The green is mild enough to be a non-issue otherwise.

People say, "Autism is on the rise" but as an autistic person I see a site like this and go, "No, autism was always with us, we just labelled it differently in the past".

I mean that lovingly.

I was having roughly the same thought. I thought to myself, this is something my son would produce, and I'd be super proud, and see through the 90's/Yahoo-ish style.

Then I saw the date of the last update: http://www.hawaiihighways.com/what's-new.htm So comprehensive!

"Autism is on the rise" isn't necessarily incompatible with autism being prevelant in the past (or mutually exclusive with the usually implied and objectionable claim that "Environmental factor X", usually vaccines, "is the cause").

If anything, based on my experience, and the experience of my autistic friends; I would expect autism to be on the rise just because of assortitive mating. With the invention of widespread access to university, and growing cities, it's much easier to meet autistic people than it would've been in the past.

Researching and publishing/hobbies is now autism?

If your hobby is anything that requires focus or attention to detail, it's autism.

That's a charming way to describe that website.

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