why is acknowledging that Hollywood knows how to tap into our "bad guy" parts (and many of us have them) unpopular on HN?
it's the same reason so many very intelligent people completely reject time-tested traditions like Christianity. we have the luxury of having morals instilled very widely. this is the legacy of religion; it's part of the state via law (one of the earliest was in the Torah, a text that is considered "religious"). yet so many of us take it for granted and then say things like "i don't need religion because i'm a good person." that's bullshit. most of us are good because we have to be.
this is exactly how a story with a moral (eg, Scarface, Wolf of Wall Street, etc.) can actually encourage bad behavior. there are MANY guys out there that have a little demon inside them that wants to be the guy before the climax of the film. but unfortunately, the expression (and arguments) of that spirit is very uncommon on HN.
i'll say it again. Hollywood and the hip hop industry are well aware that they encourage young men to indulge their somewhat anti-social instincts. In fact, it's well known that Interscope owns prisons. They make songs that encourage crime, then they make money when people go to prison.
sorry this may be way off, but feels analogous to me.
reminds me of http://www.thai-language.com/ (it's safe). it was around long before Google Translate got good enough. i don't know the authors/maintainers, but afaik, everything is entered manually. this is the "analytical" approach to language. most translations before Google Translate went full ML used an analytical approach.
anyway, long story short, turns out "analyzing" a language to "understand" it GREATLY underperforms probabilistic/statistical methods like ML.
also reminds me of trying to label parts of speech in Vietnamese. there's a school of thought that finds it useful...then there's another school of thought that plainly points out words that can be verbs, nouns, adjectives all in different contexts.
Rugged Individualism. The Hero's Journey. Jesus Christ. The ethos of the one weird man and the one weird trick. None of these have anything to do with prevention. The myths of the western world are all about story arcs: conflict + resolution. And this is very much embedded in any venture, whether private-sector or public-sector. We much prefer to read the harrowing article of a poor brave man saving someone from a ridiculous dangerous situation than preventing it to begin with.
This truism, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure", is so true...that like so many truism, it has become a minor, persistent annoyance of thought. It can be safely filed away with the Austrian school of economics.
i personally think that incompetence is actually the norm. that such things like trains even exist, imo is very much due to extraordinary people being incentivized to do extraordinary things. trains are extraordinary to me. this is not to diminish your sentiment in any way.
in fact, i think your sentiment is fundamentally the same that drives extraordinary people to do extraordinary things! it's a deep dissatisfaction with the way things are, and when it's coupled with resources, support, etc., that's when impressive things happen!
this also means that i don't think it helps much to shame people broadly or politicize the matter.
Who wants to design a basic cryptographic p2p lock between trains that limit their speed 30km/h if they're not able to get proof they're alone on a track; when the alternative is to debate endlessly about whom to blame, and which billion-dollar conglomerate has the technical prowess to sit on the committee to debate the specs for a much worse system.
I could have been more precise, but it's the same ideas underpinning HTTPS and git - long before blockchain became a hype.
Did you instead want to build some central hub that grounds all train traffic if unreachable, or create a bunch of semaphores that anything can overwrite by accident or on purpose?
I'm genuinely curious here.
I can understand being intimidated by concepts outside your wheelhouse, but if you have a simpler solution you'd feel safe with i'm all ears.
I'm not saying this is all there is too it, but I am saying all the other design choices like recovery modes, operator experience, etc - should build around cryptography between tracks and trains.
We can call them cryptographic semaphores if that makes your brain turn on again.
I don't know anything about trains so I can't really propose a solution. I just thought your proposal was funny in that it was very "HN flavored" in a domain that is somewhat far from typical HN domains. Not saying if it's good or bad, just saying I thought it was funny.
Outside of engineering, nomading and migration in general creates a form of social decoherence (eg, difficult for foreigners to get things done, hard to make friends, etc.).
Younger than that for me. As kids in elementary school my friends and I used to ride our bikes to the gas station at the entrance to our subdivision. They only had like one rack of candy bars and a soda vending machine, but for a 10 year old with some change in his pocket that was great.
This was the mid-1970s.
There was a larger "convenience store" at the other end of the next subdivision, you could bike to it but it was a few miles so we went there less often. They had a lot more snack choices though, and you could get a glimpse of the covers of the Playboy magazines that were on the shelf behind the counter.
I once paid $3500 for a very deep and low chaise lounger/sofa. It was very high quality. You did have to get used to having your feet on the seat because it was so deep, but it was a great guest bed.
But more importantly, to me, at the time, it looked very cool in my tiny downtown apartment.
reply