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>Great if you live on a route popular enough that they do that.

I was alluding to the fact that it a circular problem - frequent routes (within reason) become popular routes.

>it also doesn't solve the problem if you want to go somewhere unpopular.

The vast majority of trips are to popular locations, by definition. Everyone can still use cars for unpopular destinations.

>Waking up Saturday morning and deciding to drive out to a destination like this

One can wake up in the morning and decide to take a weekend trip without a car. The difference? It will take probably about an hour to get underway.

Meanwhile, a person in an urban area can have all of these car advantages for infrequent uses such as weekend trips or going somewhere unpopular with far less expense by having a Zipcar account.

Because I need milk for a recipe I just found online and I don't want to wait 15 minutes for the next train

Your perspective is very narrow. I asked why you should have to drive to get milk, your response is because you don't want to take a train to get milk.

There is a far simpler option than either of those.

julespitton New Cities

Thank you for the glimpse into your zoning codes - I rarely get a chance to hear ones from other countries explained, and they are always a fascinating counterpoint.

julespitton New Cities

Your point about taking your car and heading to Tahoe and Yosemite, strictly speaking, is correct. However, speaking only for myself, I do not find it particularly urgent to make long-distance trips - presumably for leisure - within ten minutes of making the decision.

The bigger question is - why is it strictly necessarily to have to use it for ten minutes - just to get milk?

And while most places in the US simply do not have it, the solution to public transportation scheduling is that they run so frequently no one bothers to check the schedule. This is, admittedly, a chicken-or-the-egg problem in most US cities, although some are starting to get it.

julespitton Costs of Sprawl: The Speed Burden (2014)

I'm not kidding. I am saying there are tradeoffs between suburban living and urban living. You give up a yard in the city. It is more expensive for far less space. However…

- I have Fishing, a Steakhouse, McDonalds, several seafood places better than Red Lobster within a 10-15 minute walk in NYC. Up until a few years ago, had horseback riding as well.

- If you expand this to a 10-15 minute subway ride, the selection gets insane.

So, no, you do not get access to more things in the suburbs, not by a lot. But as you said - you are closer to outdoorsy activities, have a yard, pay less.

These are the tradeoffs.

julespitton Costs of Sprawl: The Speed Burden (2014)

You do not have access to 10x more things, because the suburbs have less things spread out over much more area. There's no free lunch.

julespitton George-Eugène Haussmann, the man who created Paris

Not to be too pedantic, but the L'Enfant's DC plan precedes Haussmann's plan by 62 years.

julespitton Recurrent Neural Nets for Speech Synthesis

Went looking for audio samples, here's some from one of the researchers:

http://www.zhizheng.org/demo/is15_mte/demo.html http://www.zhizheng.org/demo/dnn_tts/demo.html

julespitton Hayek: Cryptocurrency backed by gold

Yeah, it's pretty sad. His design for a currency is fascinating, and apparently unknown by these people.

julespitton That Debt from 1720? Britain’s Payment Is Coming

Federal spending does not technically create money, as those dollars were collected by taxes or lent by bondholders.

However, the point of the Federal Reserve Bank is primarily to create money, or destroy it, to affect inflation, deflation, or unemployment.

julespitton Volcanic sand has been credited with the longevity of Rome’s ancient monuments

Yes, and there's more - Portland cement is made of constituent parts, each presumably extracted from different stones (using energy intensive processes) and then precisely recombined in certain ratios. Roman concrete, lime mortar, and Natural cement are made largely from just moderately heating limestone.

julespitton Volcanic sand has been credited with the longevity of Rome’s ancient monuments

I second the recommendation of Diana Kleiner's video lectures. Absolutely fantastic, thorough, and well explained.

julespitton A Print Magazine for Hackers

Correction: An earlier version of this post misidentified the programming language C as the operating system Unix.

julespitton Beethoven transformed music, but has veneration of him stifled his successors?

Got it, your language was a tad to declaritive.

It's certainly niche, and painfully so. I think there is some potential for growth, given the absurdity of my aging friends forcing themselves to continue to engage with music written predominantly for teenagers and college students.

julespitton Beethoven transformed music, but has veneration of him stifled his successors?

It's weird and false to imply that classical composition no longer exists. Classical was one of the first fields of art to retreat from mid-century modernist experimentation and get back to basics. Minimalism reintroduced such essential elements as rhythm and melody as early as the 1960s. While there's still a large avant-garde contingent, most successful living composers walk a very interesting line between the new, complex and accessible.

It's not a popular music story at all - pop/folk music has always been doing it's own thing.

julespitton Why 12-Foot Traffic Lanes Are Disastrous for Safety

When speed increases, the safe distance between cars increases as well, therefore reducing overall throughput.

julespitton Kurt Vonnegut, the Art of Fiction No. 64 (1977)

"Since publishers aren’t putting money into first novels anymore, and since the magazines have died, and since television isn’t buying from young freelancers anymore, and since the foundations give grants only to old poops like me, young writers are going to have to support themselves as shameless hacks."

julespitton Product Hunt Is in Current Y Combinator Batch

That people outside of the "voting ring" or "in-crowd" get voted up by a "voting ring" or "in-crowd" sometimes does not obviate the central criticism - insiders exclusively decide which outsiders are selected.

julespitton We Have No Idea If Online Ads Work

Thanks! Was curious if Project Wonderful worked, given how remarkably cheap it is. Targeting specific comics works best, got it.

julespitton We Have No Idea If Online Ads Work

Willing to share where you advertise and why? I've got lots of friends and relatives doing comics online, would love to have a little specialist knowledge to help them out.

julespitton Can you supercharge your brain?

Previously, when I've researched this myself casually, I've found the technical information to be too vague, in terms of both building the devices and specifically where to place them, why - and how it all fits in to the reviewed literature - if at all.

But I certainly wouldn't expect the sort of rigor others are asking for in this thread - obviously this is more hobby than science, and I'd consider personal reports interesting despite being anecdotal.

julespitton Can you supercharge your brain?

Sounds great! Definitely interested - I'll keep tabs on this.

julespitton Can you supercharge your brain?

Given that I am constantly deeply tempted to try such experiments myself, I can say - yes, there would be much value to me. Although it's perhaps likely I won't actually try, following along is still very interesting.

julespitton Facebook acquires Oculus VR

I actually had the opposite impression of stock investors, that they vastly preferred the "just getting better at what you do" than "pie-in-the-sky", but that's just an impression.

Tightly-coupled Facebook-OVR would shock me, definitely.

julespitton Facebook acquires Oculus VR

This is the first indication, to me at least, that Facebook is going to be pursuing the "Bell Labs" style strategy that Google has been. For example, self-driving cars and robots are great new technologies and industries but have less than obvious connections to Googles core business. Facebook now would seem to be doing the same.

julespitton It Is Time For Basic Income

Definitely true, it's just that people don't know that or want to believe it.

julespitton Prominent GitHub Engineer Quits, Alleging Gender-Based Harassment

Perhaps you should consider that most of those who have not rushed to judgement and are waiting on facts are not nonexistent but are merely saying nothing on Twitter nor anywhere else about it.

It is very easy to think that the Internet makes everyone worse sometimes, instead of what it actually does: expose us to our worst more than ever before.

julespitton Show HN: User-owned image sharing

Look into "DMCA safe harbor registration" if you want protection.

julespitton Apple and Google use cash to buy...treasuries?

The article goes on to criticize American tech companies for not moving overseas funds here; this after they are being criticized for buying Government debt with the money they already have here.

I am at a loss.

julespitton Zuckerberg Expresses Frustration Over Surveillance

Right, I was just pointing out the possibility of your latter two options. There was also the possibility that PRISM was just a database of formal, court-ordered information.

I wish we had even more technical details.

julespitton Zuckerberg Expresses Frustration Over Surveillance

It's not clear from the slides that the companies were "participating" at all. Further Snowden leaks showed that the NSA was cracking large internet companies' internal systems communications. PRISM doesn't necessarily need their cooperation at all.