Does anyone know the best way to get a reliably working PS2 nowadays? I happen to have a bunch of old PS2 games and would love to have a reliable PS2 to be able to use them with. But buying online seems fairly fraught - how do you have any guarantee you get a reliable device? And they seem to be fairly expensive now.
(I couldn't read the article because the site was currently down for me, so apologies if this comment is off-topic, but hopefully relevant!)
I actually have a PS2 and don't use it much, as it's a pain to hook up to a modern TV. Most games don't support progressive scan, which forces your TV to deinterlace, which im my case adds enough latency to make it unpleasant to play. There's some boutique hardware that can deinterlace with less latency, but then it starts to get expensive really fast.
Yes! That latency was very quick to induce nausea for me while trying to play Battlefront with my son. I thought maybe it was just the frame rate… but latency makes more sense.
Thanks for sharing that and solving a mystery for me!!
If your console supports either RGB output via SCART or YPbPr via component cables, which an European PS2 definitely does, I would recommend you the GBS-C. You can find it in Amazon for less than 80 euros, and the upscaling quality is great.
The author claims they could not find a buyer for theirs but they added hard drives to the finished PS2s. Browsing EBay finds a plain refurbished PS2 for 160-200 from seller with 99.3 percent rating with over 1100 sold. The mods in the article seem really nice - allowing you to rip games you own to a hard drive and play games off the hard drive instead of waiting for DVD seek/read times. There are not a lot of details about the cost of the mod in article but I’m guessing it would add a couple hundred to his sale price .
Mercari + Buyee will get you things that are decent.
Here's just one of many listings. Shipping depends on where you are of course. And it's a Japanese model so you'll need to do stuff based on that. https://jp.mercari.com/item/m93693596459
Blame the odd non-IEEE-754 floating point implementation changing physics enough that AI fails most of the missions which softblocks progress quite egregiously
Made me laugh though, when in the first level that it completely blocks, the director tells you to get close to a pickup, but the car you're chasing smashes the pickup to the sky like Team Rocket.
Last I heard there was a feature branch for testing a software implementation of floating point that would fix these issues, but naturally it would be a lot slower. I haven't tried it myself.
Either spend a lot for an eBay seller that looks reputable or find them at garage sales or thrift stores where they’re cheap enough to buy and try if you can’t fire it up there.
The ones you can find online are sold by people who know the market all too well so the prices are high. Plus it's online so there's no guarantee about anything.
Pawn shops, thrift stores, or their "modern" equivalents (EasyCash, CashConverters, etc. YMMV) would be a good start. I got mine out of a pile for 10€ at a countryside GiFi (French store) ten years ago.
Try a gaming store that offers a guarantee? I don't know where you are, but here in the UK, second-hand stores such as Cash Converters are full of PS2s, fat and slim. Dedicated second-hand entertainment stores like CEX will test consoles before buying them off people, and claim to offer a several-months guarantee.
Note that it was snowy in NYC today, so people were likely dissuaded to drive by other factors than congestion pricing as well. It'll be interesting to see what impact there is as we get further along in the year.
The dashboard is based off of Google Maps travel time data which I'm unsure of the exact accuracy. I imagine the city might also have other more direct metrics that can be used, such as the count of vehicles passing through the tunnels into the congestion zone.
I think, at least the way I would approach the problem, would be to look at the speed or flow rate of the phones on a particular road as the primary signal. I believe Google has ways of detecting if the device is in a car/vehicle vs being carried for example so they could filter out "walking" phones. Then looking at the flow of devices alleviates the need to calculate the carrying capacity of a particular road. The speed/flow tells you want you're trying to measure more directly than trying to count phones and decide if that means a road is congested or not, to do that you'd need to develop a heuristic to estimate the capacity of roads which seems like you're unnecessarily ignoring the direct signal in favor of trying to calculate it from a noisier source.
I have a flexible commute that sometimes involves driving a car into the zone and if I see snow in the forecast I'll be less likely to be in the city with a car that day.
I love congestion pricing, I will gladly pay $9 if it lowers traffic during peak hours. I also try to plan trips in the offpeak hours anyway. If you leave at 11pm you can get from shea stadium to Philly in an hour forty-five.
I think it was worse in suburban areas slightly outside of the city, at least on the NJ side. In western Bergen county, I had a bit over 1 inch and had to break out the shovel for the sidewalk.
I wonder if there will be any long term reputational repercussions for Netflix because of this. Amongst SWEs, Netflix is known for hiring the best people and their streaming service normally seems very solid. Other streaming services have definitely caught up a bit and are much more reliable then in the early days, but my impression still has always been that Netflix is a step above the rest technically.
This sure doesn't help with that impression, and it hasn't just been a momentary glitch but hours of instability. And the Netflix status page saying "Netflix is up! We are not currently experiencing an interruption to our streaming service." doesn't help either...
Not the same demographic but their last large attempt at live was through a Love is blind reunion. It was the same thing, millions of people logging in, epic failure, nothing worked.
They never tried to do a live reunion again. I suppose they should have to get the experience. Because they are hitting the same problems with a much bigger stake event.
yup wanted to say that live stream stuttering has happened before on Netflix - I don't think the reputation is deserved.
From a livestreaming standpoint, netflix is 0/x - for many large events such as love is blind, etc.
From a livestreaming standpoint, look to broadcast news, sports / Olympics broadcasters, etc and you'll see technology, equipment, bandwidth, planning, and professionalism at 1000x of netflix.
Heck, for publicly traded quarterly earnings livestream meetings, they book direct satellite time in addition to fiber to make sure they don't rely only on terrestrial networks which can fail. From a business standpoint, failure during a quarterly meeting stream can mean the destruction of a company (by making shareholders mad that they can't see and vote during the meeting making them push for internal change) - so the stakes are much higher than live entertainment streaming.
Netflix is good at many things, livestreaming is not one of those things.
for livestreams, individual events like the Olympics probably has a surge audience of 10x of netflix events.
Netflix events is small potatoes compared to other livestream stalwarts.
Imagine having to stream a cricket match internationally to UK / India / Australia with combined audience that crushes the Superbowl or a football match to all of Europe, or even something like livestreaming F1 racing that has multiple magnitudes of audience than a boxing match and also has 10x the number of cameras (at 8K+ resolution) across a large physical staging arena (the size of the track/course) in realtime, in addition to streaming directly from the cockpit of cars that are racing 200mph++.
Livestream focused outfits do this all day, everyday.
Netflix doesn't even come close to scratching the "beginner" level of these kinds of live events.
It's a matter of competencies. We wouldn't expect Netflix to be able to serve burgers like McDonald's does - Livestreaming is a completely different discipline and it's hubris on Netflix's part to assume just because they're good at sending video across the internet they can competently do livestreaming.
the point i’m making is that the netflix live streaming timeline didn’t go
chris rock -> love is blind -> mike tyson
they have had other, successful executions in between. the comment i was replying to had cherry picked failures and i’m trying to git rebase them onto main.
From what I've heard, Netflix has really diluted the culture that people know of from the Patty McCord days.
In particular, they have been revising their compensation structure to issue RSUs, add in a bunch of annoying review process, add in a bunch of leveling and titles, begin hiring down market (e.g. non-sr employees), etc.
In addition to doing this, shuffling headcount, budgets, and title quotas around has in general made the company a lot more bureaucratic.
I think, as streaming matured as a solution space, this (what is equivalent to cost-cutting) was inevitable.
If Netflix was running the same team/culture as it was 10 years ago, I'd like to say that they would have been able to pull of streaming.
Combination of 2 and 3. The business changed. Streaming was more or less a solved problem for Netflix. They needed money for content, not expensive engineers. Ted is co-ceo… you can see where the priority is.
So the issue is that Netflix gets its performance from colocating caches of movies in ISP datacenters, and a live broadcast doesn't work with that. It's not just about the sheer numbers of viewers, it's that a live model totally undermines their entire infrastructure advantage.
Correct, this is not Netflix’ regular cup of tea, and it’s a very different problem to solve. They can probably use their edge caches, but it’s challenging.
My wild assed guess is the differences in the edge nodes.
Netflix's edge nodes are optimized for streaming already encoded videos to end users. They have to transcode some number of formats from the source and send them all to the edge nodes to flow out. It's harder to manage a ton of different streams flowing out to the edge nodes cleanly.
I would guess YouTube, being built on google's infrastructure , has powerful enough edge nodes that they stream one video stream to each edge location and the edges transcode for the clients. Only one stream from source to edge to worry about and is much simpler to support and reason about.
> I would guess YouTube, being built on google's infrastructure , has powerful enough edge nodes that they stream one video stream to each edge location and the edges transcode for the clients.
Ha, no, our edge nodes don't have anywhere near enough spare CPU to do transcoding on the fly.
We have our own issues with livestreaming, but our system's developed differently over the past 15 years compared to Netflix's. While they've historically focused on intelligent pre-placement of data (which of course doesn't work for livestreaming), such an approach was never feasible for YT with the sheer size of our catalog (thanks to user-generated content).
Netflix is still new to the space, and there isn't a good substitute for real-world experience for understanding how your systems behave under wildly different traffic patterns. Give them some time.
It also helps that youtube serves shit tier quality videos more gracefully. Everyone is used to the step down to pixel-world on youtube to the point where they don’t complain much.
And decent part of these users are on free tier, so they are not paying for it. That alone gives you some level of forgiveness. At least I am not paying anything for this experience.
Live streams have different buffering logic to video on demand. Customers watching sports will get very upset if there is a long buffer, but for a VOD playback you don't care how big the buffer is. Segment sizes are short for live and long for VOD because you need to adapt faster and keep buffers small for Live, but longer download segments are better for buffering.
In my experience even YouTubeTV has problems sometimes. I'll have the 1080p (and enhanced mode also I think) quality set and still deal with a lot of compression artifacts.
Not sure how Netflix does it. But this is not very time sensitive, and I would have delayed the stream by 15 to 30 seconds to cache it and then deliver to everyone.
Not sure I fully buy that. The “live” stream is rarely “live”. It’s often a highly cached buffer that’s a few mins from latest. Those in isp caches can still help here.
Yep. Having actually worked on this sort of stuff I can confirm.
Your ISP doesn't have enough bandwidth to the Internet (generally speaking) for all users to get their feed directly from a central location. And that central location doesn't have enough bandwidth to serve all users even if the ISP could. That said, the delay can be pretty small, e.g. the first user to hit the cache goes upstream, the others basically get the stream as it comes in to the cache. This doesn't make things worse, it makes them better.
I don't bet so I have no clue, but why is that? Are people able to place bets in the middle of the match or something? I would have assumed bets get locked in when the fight starts
This is kind of silly because the delay between actual event happening to showing up on OTA TV or cable TV to showing up on satellite TV can already be tens of seconds.
Or, hear me out here, it's a wild concept, just work.
You know, like every other broadcaster, streaming platform, and company that does live content has been able to do.
Acting like this is a novel, hard problem that needs to be solved and we need to "upsell" it in tiers because Netflix is incompetent and live broadcasting hasn't been around for 80+ years is so fucking stupid.
I don't think that live doesn't work with caches. No one watching live would care about a O(s) delay, which is highly amenable to caching at ISPs and streaming changes from there to downstream clients. Offhand I'd say that would support O(ms) delay but no less.
That model still works for streaming. You have a central source stream only to the distributed edge locations, then have clients only stream from their local edge location. Even if one region is overwhelmed, the rest can still work. Load on the central source is bounded.
Likely these devices use different media formats and/or quality levels. And yes, it's possible one device buffers more than the other. Infinite freezes sounds like some routing issues or bugs.
When I was watching the behavior on the tv, was wondering if buffering sends some separate, non-business-as-usual requests, and that part of Netflix's delivery architecture was being overloaded.
E.g. "give me this previous chunk" vs "send me the current stream"
Buffering typically just consumes the same live stream until there's enough in the buffer. No difference other than the request rate being potentially higher. At least I can confidently say that for the standard players/video platforms. NetFlix could be doing something different. I'm not sure if they have their own protocols. But I'd be very surprised if the buffering used a completely different mechanism.
Damn that sucks. I wonder if they could have intentionally streamed it 5 min late? I don’t have all the context around the fight though — maybe a competing service would win if Netflix intentionally induced delay?
they were introducing 5 minute delays on some of the clients. I noticed my ipad was always live and the smart tv had a 5 minute delay but you could fast forward to live.
If Netflix still interviews on hacker rank puzzles I think this should be a wake up call. Interviewing on irrelevant logic puzzles is no match for systems engineering.
I did a round of netflix interviews, didn't get an offer (but passed the technical coding rounds) they absolutely had the best interview process of any company I've interviewed at my entire career.
They do make you code but the questions were
1. Not on hacker rank or leetcode
2. Pratical coding questions that didn't require anything more than basic hashmaps/lists/loops/recursion if you want. Some string parsing, etc.
They were still hard, you had to code a fast, but no tricky algorithms required. It also felt very collaborative, it felt like you were driving pair programming. Highly recommended even though didn't get an offer!
For systems design and engineering, absolutely this. I expected the very highest standards and upmost uptime from Netflix, similar to Google and Amazon.
Tells you the uselessness of their engineering blogs.
If places like Paramount+ can figure it out, Netflix, given their 10+ year head start on streaming and strong engineering culture, should also have been able to. And if you don't like my example, literally every other streaming service has streamed live sports without issue. YT TV, Hulu, Paramount+, Amazon Prime, Peacock, even Apple TV streams live sports.
It may be "new" to them, but they should have been ready.
I won’t argue that they shouldn’t have done better, I’m only pointing out that this is fairly different from their usual product. Amazon, YouTube, and Hulu all have a ton of experience with live streaming by now. Apple has live streamed wwdc for several years.
I did expect that Netflix would have appropriately accounted for demand and scale, though, especially given the hype for this particular event.
Has Netflix ever live streamed something before? People on reddit are reporting that if you back up the play marker by about 3 minutes the lag goes away. They've got a handle on streaming things when they have a day in advance to encode it into different formats and push it to regional CDNs. But I can't recall them ever live streaming something. Definitely nothing this hyped.
I don't spend much time streaming, but I got a glimpse of the Amazon Prime catalog yesterday, and was surprised at how many titles on the front page were movies I'd actually watch. Reminded me of Netflix a dozen years ago.
Amazon Prime isn't so great. Lots of for rent/purchase content or content with ads these days. And they end up repeating slots of content in all the rows in their UI, so I end up seeing the same suggestions everywhere rather than much that's new (other than first party productions).
To me they're basically padding their front page.
But honestly that's most of the major streaming platforms these days. I recently cancelled Disney Plus for similar reasons. The only reasons I don't cancel prime or Netflix are because I have family members I split the memberships with to share.
I recently found a lil dvd rental place in my city. It’s a non-profit, they also do archivals and stuff.
It’s pretty much a two-story townhouse packed head to toe with DVDs (lots of blu rays!)
You don’t realize how limited the streaming collection is until you’re back in a movie store, looking through thousands and thousands of movies you would never find otherwise.
Since I found it, I’ve started doing movie night every week with my friends. It’s such an absolute blast. We go to the store, each pick out a random movie that looks good (or bad, in a good way) or just different.
That's an excellent option. I think it'd be remiss not to mention local libraries. Of course, your mileage may vary, but the ones I've gone to do seem to have adequate selections. I just don't often make time to go there and browse like I would have at traditional video rental places back in the day.
Heck, mine even have some video games; though from when I've checked they're usually pretty back-reserved.
I was in high school in the early 00s, and going to the movies was such a big part of my life. Now, I never even know what's out.
I suspect life stage is a factor, but it does feel like there are many classes of entertainment (cinema and standup come to mind) that don't resonate like they used to.
Back in the day everyone was watching the same thing.
The choices for entertainment were limited to whatever was showing in movie theatres, whatever was on TV and whatever record stores were selling.
I've given Netflix a lot more money than I've gotten value out of. I've had an account for ~15y and only really use it for airplanes unless there's a specific thing I'm excited to watch.
I'm in the same boat where as soon as they make it too hard to share, I'll probably cancel it. I think the main reason their sharing crackdown hasn't been a problem so far is that I use it so seldomly, it thinks the "main" address is my parents, which makes it easy for me to pass the "are you traveling" 2FA on my own phone when I do want to watch something.
> And they end up repeating slots of content in all the rows in their UI, so I end up seeing the same suggestions everywhere rather than much that's new
All of the streaming services do this and I hate it. Netflix is the worst of the bunch, in my experience. I already scrolled past a movie, I don't want to watch it, don't show it to me six more times.
Imagine walking through a Blockbuster where every aisle was the same movies over and over again.
There's also the "FreeVee" items, which have ads regardless of whether you're a prime subscriber or not. And it feels like a lot of their catalog has been transferred over to FreeVee.
It's been pretty rough the last few years. So many great films and series, not to mention kids programming, removed to make way for mediocre NeTfLiX oRiGiNaLs and Bollywood trash.
Prime Video has to be the worst of all major streaming services. The video quality is horrible, its crippled with ads (3 not skippable ads for an episode of 45 minutes, lastly), and a lot of interesting titles are behind a "partner paywall".
I have prime and my shopping experience is crippled with ads too.
I think it got worse for sellers recently too. If I search for something, like a specific item using its description, sometimes the only result for it shows "sponsored".
It used to show up as sponsored and also unsponsored below.
If this changed, I assume it is bad for the seller. Either they pay for all search results, or their metrics are skewed because all searches were helped by "sponsorship" (and there are no longer unsponsored hits)
I was watching the rings of power and it started with a "Commercial free experience provided by so and so" with a long ad at the start of the episode, and then a third of the way into the episode, at a critical action part, it broke in the middle of the actor's sentence to a 6 minute ad block.
I exited playback and haven't gone back to finish it. I'll wait for it eventually to make it to a Blu-ray release someday.
> ut my impression still has always been that Netflix is a step above the rest technically.
I always assumed youtube was top dog for performance and stability. I can’t remember the last time I had issues with them and don’t they handle basically more traffic than any other video service?
Maybe a client issue, but i've got a low-end smart tv which handles netflix fine, but youtube is unwatchable due to buffering and failed cuts to adverts
I think Netflix will have even more sw engineers looking to work there once they notice even for average quality of work they can get paid 3 times more than their current pay.
Is it really that big a deal if you are watching a few minutes behind?
I've watched ball games on streaming networks where I can also hear a local radio broadcast, and the stream is always delayed compared to the radio, sometimes by quite a lot. But you'd never know it if you were just watching the stream.
I remember a few years ago reading about a scam at the Australian Open Tennis where there were people inside the stadium who were betting on individual points as they happened.
I guess they could bet before the betting streams caught up.
It seems ridiculous to me that you can bet on individual points, but here we are.
The issue is that most people are trying to watch live which is what it's advertised as. And until they figure out that they need to watch X minutes behind, it is unwatchable. Many will not figure that out.
So for the first hour it was just total frustration until I stopped trying to go back to live mode.
Internet streams are not real-time even in the best case. There is always a few seconds of delay, often quite a bit more than that depending on number of hops and link speeds, congestion, etc.
Most people pay Netflix to watch movies and tv shows, not sports. If I hadn't checked Hacker News today, I wouldn't even know they streamed sports, let alone that they had issues with it. Even now that I do, it doesn't affect how I see their core offering, which is their library of on-demand content.
Netflix's infrastructure is clearly built for static content, not live events, so it's no shock they aren't as polished in this area. Streaming anything live over the internet is a tough technical challenge compared to traditional cable.
I think why I will remember about this fight is not the (small) streaming issue I encountered as much as the poor quality of the fight itself. For me that was the reputational loss. Netflix was touting “NFL is coming to Netflix”. This fight did not really make me want to watch that.
I don't care about boxing or UFC or the grade-A douchebags that are the Paul brothers, but I tuned in just because I had the time and a Netflix subscription.
It was actually great that the fight itself was so boring because it justifies never having to spend time / money on that kind of bullshit. It was a farce. A very bright, loud, sparkly, and expensive (for some people) farce.
The value I got from it was the knowledge that missing out on that kind of thing isn't really missing out on anything at all.
Not really a joke, though? VOD has obvious methods to cheat a bit. Redundancy abounds and you can even network shape for costs. Could probably get even better compression for clear reasons.
Live, not so much. One source that you have to fanout from and absolutely no way to get cheap redundancy. Right?
I don't think it'll be long-term. Most people will forget about this really quickly. It's not like there will be many people saying "Oh, you don't want to sign up for Netflix, the Tyson fight wasn't well streamed" in even 6 months nevermind 10 years.
Most third-party internet-based streaming solutions are overlaid on top of a point-to-point network, while broadcast is one-to-many, and even cable tends to use multicast within the cable provider's network.
You have potentially different problems, e.g. limited bandwidth / spectrum. If, say, there are multiple games going on at the same time, you can only watch whichever feed the broadcaster decides to air. And, of course, regardless of the technology in use, there are matters of acquiring rights for various events. One benefit of internet-based streaming is that one service can acquire the rights and be able to reach everyone, whereas an individual cable provider might only reach its direct subscribers.
On cable(terrestrial is entirely different) even the bandwidth or spectrum is less limiting for broadcasting multiple games. Hard thing is the other parts of production, like cameras, live-directing and live commentary. Adding new channels is less challenging than actual producing content at expected level there.
Based on this I'm wondering whether it was straight up they did not expect it to be this popular?
> Some Cricket graphs of our #Netflix cache for the #PaulVsTyson fight. It has a 40 Gbps connection and it held steady almost 100% saturated the entire time.
I don't think Netflix is even designed to handle very extreme multi-region live-streaming at scale as evidenced in this event with hundreds of millions simultaneously watching.
YouTube, Twitch, Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc have all demonstrated to stream simultaneously to hundreds of millions live without any issues. This was Netflix's chance to do this and they have largely failed at this.
There are no excuses or juniors to blame this time. Quite the inexperience from the 'senior' engineers at Netflix not being able to handle the scale of live-streaming which they may lose contracts for this given the downtime across the world over this high impact event.
Very embarrassing for a multi-billion dollar publicly traded company.
The assumption that it was related to insufficient investment isn’t supported by any evidence. Flawed technical decisions can be made by the most expensive engineers too.
Other potential and future entertainment partners Netflix will be working with e.g. WWE, will certainly see my view as they will be questioning Netflix's capability after that major streaming issue we both saw.
This isn't Netflix's first time they had this live streaming problem.
People will see this as an underinvestment from Netflix's part and they will reconsider going to a different streaming partner.
Yea, it’s a bad look. But I switched to watching some other Netflix video and it seemed fine. Just this event had some early issues. Looks fine now though.
Streamed glitch free for me both on my phone and Xbox. The fight wasn’t so great though, but still a fun event. Jake Paul is a money machine right now.
Static files have been pretty much the standard streaming protocols for both VOD and live for the last 15 years ago. Before, it was Adobe Flash (RTMP).
With the way that they are designed, you can even use a regular CDN.
You can push these files to all the edges before you release the content which will protect your origin. Livestream all your edge servers are grabbing content from the origin unless you have another tier of regional servers to alleviate load.
Sure but that’s why your edge servers do request collapsing. And there are full blown CDN companies that will write an enterprise contract with you that can do this stuff with ease. Akamai is like 25 years old now.
Scale has increased but the techniques were figured out 20 years ago. There is not much left to invent in this space at the current moment so screwing up more than once is a bit unacceptable.
Two games actually, both on Christmas Day. A day when most people are at home or the home of family or friends, and they are both pretty good late-season matchups (Chiefs-Steelers and Ravens-Texans) so I imagine viewership will be high.
If they botch the NFL games, it will surely hurt their reputation.
Yeah, the funny part is that Hulu, Amazon Prime, and Peacock have all demonstrated the ability to handle an event of this caliber with no issue. Netflix now may never get another opportunity like this again.
The picture of the roundabout from above at the beginning of the article is extra confusing because it doesn't have the final lane markings yet and the ones you can see are misleading.
The (presumably) final markings[0] make things less confusing.
I was looking at the markings that are there, and they made it seem like traffic approaching the roundabout would have priority over traffic already on it.
What the hell is that "dump truck with trailer" on a really long connector at 3:50? Is that a thing in some parts? How does that navigate almost any kind of roadway safely?
They're called "pup" trailers [1] (example photo [2]), and the very long hitch exists for a few reasons: per-axle weight limit, respecting max weight capacity of smaller bridges, and ease of unloading [3] among them.
What's the benefit to streetcars over busses with a dedicated, physically separated right of way?
I like the idea of streetcars, but busses seem easier to purchase than streetcars, standard road paving seems easier to maintain than streetcar tracks and power, and likely it's easier to find/train bus operators than streetcar operators (even though I assume streetcars are actually a bit easier to operate).
* recently a big trend is grass tramways. generally speaking this is more ecologically friendly by reducing impervious surfaces and replacing it with greenery, which generally lowers the urban heat island effect and is better for stormwater absorption. as a nice side effect, it is also generally a more visible differentiator from car lanes that people are less willing to drive over.
* trams are generally more capacious than buses because they are laid out better for more standing room. they are also more capacious because it is safer to run very long trams since the tram is fixed to the tracks; there are practical limits to how long a bus can be since a driver needs to be careful when switching lanes and whatnot. The longest single tram unit is 58m, the longest single bus is 32m; and you can couple trams together.
* trams don't really move side to side due to being fixed to tracks, so level boarding with little to no gap is much more realistic to achieve than on buses. This is generally much better for accessibility and speeds up boarding time; if you've spent any time riding a city bus, even a low floor bus spends a significant amount of time kneeling to achieve worse results for level boarding. And buses kneel not only for people in wheelchairs, but for people with strollers, with luggage, the elderly, etc.
Would just like to note one issue i have observed with the MPLS light rail: multi-car transit has less oversight and is more attractive for drug use and shelter for the homeless which lowers use by commuters. Our busses running the same routes are safer and better options.
I haven't seen these problems on the Minneapolis Metro even riding at night, but if it is actually a problem, it seems like the solution is build out actual infrastructure to support the homeless community.
Which Minneapolis very much does not have right now despite the best efforts of one or two plucky underfunded nonprofits.
If your light rail cars are the best option people have, that's not an issue with the transit design, that's an issue with the rest of the infrastructure
It’s a severe problem in mpls. Are you sure we’re talking about the same city and rail system? Never heard it called “the metro”. I was born and raised in DC where that’s what folks call the subway… only ever heard it called the light rail…
The rapid transit system in Minneapolis, MN is called the Metro. Technically that includes the bus rapid transit system, but I'm just talking about the light rail since I do prefer it over the buses.
All I can say is I've never seen any issues on the LRT. I'm genuinely sorry you have.
In prague there is both extensive bus network and tram network. I almost always go for buses. The capacity is just so much higher and usually the drive is much smoother compared to buses. Also trams are powered by electricity making it more efficient and c02 neutral...
> standard road paving seems easier to maintain than streetcar tracks
I would think that tracks last way longer.
Overall I think the cost is lower in long term for street cars but the initial cost is super high - e.g. edinburgh build one awkward tram line for around 700m. But thats with depots, cars everything. In Prague with all existing infrastructure it cost now about 78m usd to build 2.2km of tram with 6 stops.
Fellow European here. My understanding is street cars started out as futuristic marvels of modernity, but unlike their cousins trains & subways, they aged fairly poorly and don't generally do well in mixed city traffic today:
First, you can’t go faster than cars or avoid traffic (in practice), so there’s no obvious advantage like with trains. Secondly, buses got a lot cleaner, spacious, comfortable and quieter. The modern buses in European cities are not just on-par, but often more comfortable and allow higher speed on long stretches, because modern suspension beats aging fixed rail (it tends to be shaky, again unlike trains). So then what’s the point? Trams are electric? Given how buses are basically commodity in our oil-centric world, I can only imagine how trams look at the balance sheet in comparison.
Now, there are some exceptional cases where I really like trams. When the route has majority separate rail (typically in beautiful stretches of nature) but can switch into streets when needed to reach better. For instance, Tvärbanan in Stockholm is a tram that – while not always perfect – is universally appreciated by most.
I really like the idea that street cars, trains and subways could share a single network (kinda like they do in Tokyo, except Tokyo doesn't really have street cars, mostly trains - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KMYAEIXVzA).
It would allow trains to come from one direction, pass through the city undisturbed and emerge on the other side and continue.
> First, you can’t go faster than cars or avoid traffic (in practice),
that is not true, in cities the car speed is usually limited to 50, a lot of trams go 70 on certain sections. Also "or avoid traffic" a lot of trams go completely separetely from the traffic.
> because modern suspension beats aging fixed rail (it tends to be shaky, again unlike trains).
Depends on the city, but a lot of cities that I visited have a very modern trams that are not shaky (helsinky, zurich, bratislava, riga, edinburgh, bordeaux...). Also the technology of the rail building has changed and the new lines are meant to be quiter and more stable
> Trams are electric? Given how buses are basically commodity in our oil-centric world, I can only imagine how trams look at the balance sheet in comparison
> No idea what you mean by this but I would assume that the cost of running things is lower
I meant that light rail must be much more expensive, but now I’m not so sure. I hadn’t considered you can have more passengers per driver and if labor is dominating cost then yeah trams can be cheaper!
> a lot of cities that I visited […]
Have you accounted for the reliability of these networks? In my experience trams (or rather tracks and electrical- and signal systems) often break down when there’s snow in the winter, leaves in the fall or sun-bending in the summer, which may not be noticeable on visits. That can also increase costs, since the backup is usually buses and you need a task force who can go fix problems.
Maybe I’ve been unlucky, but my experiences relying on them everyday (in San Francisco and Gothenburg) have been disappointing.. it feels like those networks have been kept alive for nostalgic reasons.
> I meant that light rail must be much more expensive, but now I’m not so sure. I hadn’t considered you can have more passengers per driver and if labor is dominating cost then yeah trams can be cheaper!
Well labor and gas/electricity. I think in most places in EU the electricity will win over gas easily.
> often break down when there’s snow in the winter, leaves in the fall or sun-bending in the summer, which may not be noticeable on visits.
Not an issue in Prague where I have experienced them the most. You can clean the tracks in similar way that you would clean the road, so the buses would not have much of an advantage..
> it feels like those networks have been kept alive for nostalgic reasons.
i have not been there, so maybe its true tho Gothenburg seems to be investing into the network and buying new trams. So are a lot of other cities.
The main one, in my mind, is permanency: as I mentioned in the adjacent comment, stable car-independent communities tend to be built around transportation systems that can’t be easily removed.
(I think there are other benefits, like being slightly more comfortable. But permanency is by far the most important.)
Trams are more capacious than buses because they don’t have onboard fuel tanks, so more space for passengers; and they’re fixed to tracks so they can be significantly longer without worrying about the back swinging out.
Trams are also perfectly level with platforms, so there’s no need to waste time to achieve level boarding for wheelchairs, strollers, luggage and the elderly; buses can spend quite a lot of time kneeling and deploying ramps.
Streetcars can be up to 100m (300ft) long and fit 1000 people, saving costs for drivers.
Roads works are expensive [citation needed], and buses are heavy [citation needed], so they cause lots of damage over time. These costs are often not tracked correctly. Metallic rails require far less maintenance, but have a higher initial cost.
Trams can be quieter than ICE buses.
If build appropriately, Teams can even take sharper turns than buses.
Checking out on Amazon seems to have been down for a large number of users for the past 5+ hours or so (as of 10PM ET). This is the largest actual Amazon shopping outage I can think of in a long time and interesting how long it's been ongoing.
The context here (since the title isn't too revealing), is that the FDA expanded approval for a drug despite essentially unanimous didagreement from the scientists actually analyzing the drug. Derek Lowe, a well-respected pharma blogger, writes about how this was a big mistake and a very bad look for the FDA.
"Apparently during the conference call, when [the Sarepta CEO] was asked about why he was so confident [about the Duchenne muscular dystrophy medication's approval], he said that the FDA's CBER head Peter Marks was "very supportive". [...]
Boy, was that the truth. The agency has just granted that use expansion, and it turns out that it was all due to Peter Marks, who completely overruled three review teams and two of his highest-level staffers (all of whom said that Sarepta had not proven its case)."
[The article then talks about how this may be "A positive vote, which marks an undeserved and potentially hazardous victory of emotional rhetoric and relentless patient advocacy over the scientific and medical evidence."]
This is interesting. I didn't know about the influence of the CEO and this narrative around this medications approval/label expansion.
I'm not sure why I'm mentioning this (Devil's advocacy?), some users on HN have also commented that maybe it is good that the FDA approves medications more liberally to give clinicians and patients a chance to experiment with them (if their situations are dire).
Anyways, in this case, it is interesting to think about how much influence one person can have in the FDA.
It is, sort of, through Dependent Care FSA programs which let you contribute money pre-tax and then spend it on child care. For some reason though, the limit is $5000/year which isn't nearly enough to cover any sort of frequent child care. It's also sort of a pain to administer these programs.
There's also a child care tax credit which gives a similar amount of tax savings. So overall you do have some tax benefits to help with daycare costs, but they could be better.
You can also tweak the behavior via `about:config` to emphasize the types of results you care about. I like to set `browser.search.suggest.enabled` to `false` to keep it from showing search suggestions since I almost exclusively want to either type in my own search term or go back to a previous webpage I've visited.
The proper end user settings for this are currently in about:preferences#privacy (also linked to from about:preferences#search where most users would probably expect them). We have a myriad of about:config prefs affecting the address bar that are hard to keep track of and understand even for Firefox engineers (e.g. because the term "suggest" is overloaded), so I'd avoid recommending about:config to end users even among the Hacker News audience.
The UI doesn't let you turn off searching from the address bar. It does let you choose to have a separate search box, but that doesn't seem to alter the address bar's behaviour. And when you do disable search with about:config the prompt still reads "Search with Bing or enter address".
Thanks for the improved tip - I have found it hard to parse through all the address-bar-related about:config options in the past, the UI seems like a better way!
(I couldn't read the article because the site was currently down for me, so apologies if this comment is off-topic, but hopefully relevant!)