sid-kap

Google, Facebook, and Amazon? Many of my friends believe that Google's new Austin office might lead to other tech companies to move here, but that's just speculation.

Whoa, didn't know he was still updating it! Last year he announced that he was done working on it: http://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/docs.html

It's really hard to accommodate both in one place. Quality high-frequency, low-cost (to ticket-payers and taxpayers) transit requires a certain amount of density. Otherwise you won't have frequent bus service within walking distance of every residence. Also, the infrastructure that is necessary for low-density living—parking lots (especially setbacks), wide (6-lane) roads with high (40-45mph) speed limits and few crosswalks, long (1/2 mile) blocks, highways—hurts walkability. Part of this is subjective but still legitimate imo (pedestrians prefer businesses on the street with no setback), and part of this is objective (long blocks makes crossing hard, lots of parking means places become farther apart and therefore less amenable to walking).

I'm curious what you think about this as someone who presumably lives in South Bay. Do you consider South Bay a place where people can get around just walking and using transit? What changes do you think could be made there that increases support for walking/transit without impeding car travel or increasing density?

These are looking at the densities of entire metropolitan areas, which doesn't mean much.

In the NY-NJ metro area there are lots of high-density cities, like Manhattan at 70,000/sq. mi.; Brooklyn, Union City, Hoboken, at 40,000/sq. mi.; Queens at 20,000/sq. mi. There is empty space between these cities, which lowers the density of the metro area, but that doesn't really matter.

On the other hand, SV cities (Mountain View, Sunnyvale, San Jose), actually are at densities of 5,000-6,000/sq. mi.

The figure we should actually be looking at is weighted population density, not population density.

If anyone's looking for a good source of information on transportation costs, I highly recommend http://twitter.com/MarketUrbanism and http://twitter.com/2AveSagas. They cut through the BS of the mainstream media and politicians on transportation policy and give really intelligent opinions, particularly on zoning/land use and on the US's ridiculous transit costs.

(A lot of it is complaining about the ridiculous cost of New York's Second Avenue Subway, and complaining about how the media won't even mention that its cost was 3-5 times more per km than similar routes in London, Paris, and elsewhere in Europe. @MarketUrbanism also has a few other ticks:

* He aggressively argues that train systems in the US should save money by getting rid of conductors.

* Also, he argues that US buses should use Europe-style fare policing (with ticket inspectors) rather than requiring people to swipe as they board the bus.)

They're snarky and a bit hard to undeedia won't even mention that its cost was 3-5 times more per km than similar routes in London, Paris, and elsewhere in Europe. @MarketUrbanisrstand to the uninitiated, but they grow on you. I've learned a lot from them.

I know this is petty, but I kinda hope they build this on better technology than MediaWiki. MediaWiki has lots of annoying pitfalls. For example, there is no native support for threaded conversations. Also they have 2 or 3 different math syntaxes and no consensus on which one should be used where.

> Last year, the share of coal in total power generation dropped to 9 percent, down from 23 percent in 2015 and 40 percent in 2012.

How have they done this so quickly?

Is the US the only state whose federal bank (the Fed) controls the inter-bank lending rate (called the federal funds rate in the US)? What are the pros and cons of the Bank of England not setting Libor in the same way?

This is probably the best thing you can do in a town that is not even close to dense enough to support public transit (population density 361/sq. mi., 20 times less than a Silicon Valley suburb). Better than nothing because it uses tax revenues to subsidize rides for people with low incomes.

TeX source for the book is available at http://www.inference.eng.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/. I believe this is the latest version.

Nope, Hangouts also has the ability to send SMSs through Google, even from your computer. AIM and Yahoo Messenger also used to let you do this from your computer. It doesn't use your phone number. I think this is the distinction jimmies is trying to make.

I don't see the pun. Can you explain it?

The comparison between Stack and Python build tools is striking:

> No messing around with virtualenvs and requirement files. Everybody builds with the same dependency versions. No more “works on my machine” and “did you install the latest requirements?”.

I wonder why the Python ecosystem, which is much more mature, doesn't provide a build tool as delightful as Stack (which is less than 2 years old).

Can you elaborate---how is the standard deduction related to housing/mortgage interest deduction?

True. In practice, though, this isn't a problem. Most Scala code I've worked with just pretends `null` doesn't exist, which is a fair assumption if you're interfacing with well-behaved Scala libraries that never return null.

As awful as this is, it seems completely legal since the executive agencies operate at the mercy of the President. The President has the authority to tell the EPA to stop researching climate science, or to even disband the EPA.

Have we never considered this scenario before? Has there ever been an attempt to establish independent agencies, not subject to the whims of the White House? (IIRC, maybe the CIA or the FBI are independent agencies?)

Can we stop making references to the trolley problem with respect to self-driving cars?

Insync is also very good.

I think it has more to do with how close the intersections are. Even in no traffic, you have to stop at a light every minute or so.

If you don't mind, could you elaborate a bit? How was being around academics/children of academics beneficial to you? Did you end up going into academia, and did your experience with academia differ from the other experiences presented in this thread?

Is social media really more of an echo chamber than traditional newspapers/TV stations?

* Most of the liberal stuff in my FB/Twitter feeds are from NYT or Washington Post

* Back in the day, consumers of traditional media probably zoned out of TV bits/skimmed over newspaper articles that they didn't agree with

The whole "echo chamber" thing seems like a meme to me. "In the olden days, we used to go to ye olde coffee store and have intellectual conversations with randos with different political beliefs."

Aren't coastal areas more prone to flooding?

Reminds me of something from Aristotle, although he said the converse:

> ...evidently all lawful acts are in a sense just acts...

> But since unfair and the unlawful are not the same, but are different as a part is from its whole (for all that is unfair is unlawful, but not all that is unlawful is unfair)...

–Nicomachean Ethics, Book V

It would be cool to maintain a fork of the book with updated figures. Is the tex source available anywhere?

EDIT: What seems to be the latest version of the source files is hosted at http://www.inference.eng.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/.

btw, you've linked to a 2012 version of the book. Since 2012, they've added another author and changed the name of the book. I have no idea how much the content changed.

Anyway, here's the latest version of the book: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/jeh/book2016June9.pdf . (I got the link from http://www.cs.cornell.edu/jeh/)

MacKay talked about this in Without Hot Air (https://www.withouthotair.com/).

If I remember correctly, he said that the energy use per-person in a (full) commercial aircraft flying from A to B is half as much as the energy use per-car if you drove from A to B.

This means that if two people carpool from A to B, you're as efficient per-person as flying from A to B; if four people carpool, it's twice as efficient per-person as flying.

Please call me out if I'm wrong or if I misunderstood the passage from Without Hot Air.

EDIT: Source: See table 5.3 on https://www.withouthotair.com/c5/page_36.shtml

Minor nit: GHC has a LLVM backend (in addition to an assembly backend and a C backend), but the assembly backend is the most commonly used.

(The LLVM backend is known to produce better-optimized code, but the compile times are slower.)

Not trying to detract from your point, but it's interesting to note that even C and x86 are "pretending modern computers work in a way they don't" (see http://blog.erratasec.com/2015/03/x86-is-high-level-language...).

Check out Hayoo (http://hayoo.fh-wedel.de/) -- I like it more than Hoogle