tylervigen

Me too! I would have missed out on all the fun if I had learned the answer on day one.

If anyone will appreciate this, Hacker News will: this page is un-monetized, has no ads, no cookies, no Google Trackers, and loads no external scripts. You can check! I (the author) don't even know how many people are on the page (except that it is a lot because it's linked here).

The images do load from a different domain (tylervigentest.com), but that is for a different reason. I was overwhelming my webhost with more DNS requests than it could handle.[0] I went to move my domain, but it got locked in the process (I don't know why). Offloading the images was the only way I could think to reduce the strain on the current DNS server.

[0]See, for example, the comments section of the submission here a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37318295

Ha! Love the analogy. I agree. That statistic is totally unhelpful.

Author here! Glad you all enjoyed the article. It was a fun journey into the history of my community.

For the record: I am an advocate of walkability and think there should be more bridges, not fewer. I just wondered how that one got there given the context of limited walkability in the area.

>I disagree with the central assumption that reconnecting neighborhood roads cut by Interstates should be an exception rather than a rule.

Author here: That was not meant to be my central assumption! Sorry if it came across that way. I only called it out to note that the lack of walkability in the area made this bridge stand out. I wish that area (and other areas in my community) were more walkable and bike-friendly.

I was pleasantly impressed too! I've always had good luck getting replies from officials, but I got particularly good responses from the folks named in the article.

Glad you enjoyed it!

Author here. That is definitely not what I meant to imply at all! I'm sorry if you interpreted it that way.

I love walkability and am an advocate of pedestrian and bike-centric city planning. I wrote that sentence to indicate that the bridge was especially surprising to me given the context of the lack of walkability nearby. i.e., "Why make THIS SPECIFIC PLACE walkable if nothing else around here is?"

I agree that walkability and the culture around cars and walking is abysmal in the United States.

However, I should clarify that this particular location is primarily a warehouse for industrial equipment for use at the airport. Most of its business is from trucks that use the dock. It would be great if the area was more walkable, but if we made it more walkable we would not prioritize this specific business.

(Context: I am the author of the article.)

Ha! Author here. I actually posted it here right after I published it earlier this week. I thought it was more Hacker News material than Reddit material. But no one saw it at the time. Guess it didn't get the good numbers from the algorithm.

For the record: none of the other repostings of it were from me.

It's even weirder than that! Residents of Richfield at the time saw the lack of sidewalks as a feature, not a bug. They wanted to distinguish themselves from Minneapolis, so they protested the building of sidewalks because "how would people know we are a suburb if we have sidewalks?" (This is a real quote from a real, very politically active resident at the time. Seriously.)

Context: I wrote the article linked in the OP.

Author of the original article here. I actually remember that bridge! It's such a huge mass of concrete. For me it is memorable because it's right next to the only Microcenter in Cambridge. If I wanted to buy a Raspberry Pi while in law school (more common of an occurrence than I care to admit), that's where I'd go.

Oh I agree! I didn't spell it out in the article (I am the author), but I am a huge advocate of walkability. But if you gave me $1M and asked me to make this area more walkable, I still wouldn't build a bridge there. It's just so terribly unwalkable that that project would not even make my list. I would start with some sidewalks to get folks off the roads.

Funny story: the original residents of Richfield push back against building sidewalks, because they thought NOT having sidewalks would make them more distinguishable from Minneapolis as a suburb. That is bonkers to me.

While not the key point of the article, if this made you at all curious about engine maintenance then I would recommend checking out howacarworks.com

It was posted here a while back and I’ve been enjoying the detailed build up.

Is there a reason an app needs to check for updates every 5 minutes vs, say, once a day? That would have made this situation 288 times better, and reduced the processing tax on people’s devices.

I like your theory but I worry that the extreme of the defender “winning” is locking your (homemade) computer in a faraday cage running on a generator and airgapped from the internet.

What freedoms will we lose to ensure security?

> it's not how much you eat, but what you eat and when

That doesn’t seem to contradict the article. They both acknowledge that what and when you eat are important.

But that’s true with or without the AI. Anyone could decide they want to kill you. Most of the time we rely on “not everyone wanting to kill everyone else” to get by.

Because AirDrop only exposes the info of the sending phone, not the receiving phone.

I once spent a month blind taste-testing apples with my wife to compare the apples in our supermarket. We learned 4 things:

1) Most of the Honeycrisp varietals that make it to market are good (Wild Twist and Cosmic Crisp being our favorites), but…

2) The time of year makes a HUGE difference. It seems obvious when I say it, but different varietals from different farms are best in different weeks. Honeycrisp has an advantage here because it has so many growers that someone is keeping a batch in good condition for practically every week of the year.

3) You have to go by the apples in your local market. Lists like these are hard to use because there are many more apples on it than you have available to choose from - most grocery stores only stock 3-10 varieties depending on time of year

4) Your use case is critical. Obviously baking a pie requires a different apples from eating, but even if you are just eating the apples raw there are differences. Some apples beat others in texture when cut up, but have the wrong density to eat by biting down on the apple

After all our testing, we mostly went back to Honeycrisp because it’s so reliable.

This method is obviously biased towards people who have already played Factorio, and in a lesser way towards folks who play games.

Maybe that’s similar to the bias toward knowing FizzBuzz, but it’s much weirder?

Right but the point is that there may be nothing special about this particular exercise.

It’s a bit complicated to get the equipment and training to learn how to do this; maybe that effort is better allocated to just encouraging people to get up and go for a walk every once in a while.

Incident impact and response seems adequate to me. Obviously I’d prefer no incidents, but this with the right layers of security in place to prevent out from impacting users and transparent reporting are the next best thing.

This is a delightful story. Thank you for sharing.

Not point of your post, but when I click that link on my phone Reddit won’t let me read it without downloading the app. The two options are download the app or go back to popular.

It’s crazy to me that Reddit would be willing to go to that extreme to get people to download their app.

In case anyone hasn't read it, the NASA coding process is extremely interesting: http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff

If it's hosted locally, what stops an intruder from stealing or destroying your server once they break in?