mg

    why any public transport authority would do seating-only urban buses

To get people to use the bus instead of a car.

The average car costs €300/month. Plus about the same amount of opportunity costs, missed by having to control the steering wheel for about an hour per day.

A public transport flatrate in Germany is only €59.

Seems like there is a huge gap in the middle for a better bus experience.

It would not degrade the system but wastly improve it. Because the buses would be additional buses. Each bus taking over 100 cars of the road. A bus can carry over 20 passengers and drive over 10 hours per day. While the average car ride carries 1.1 passengers or so and the car is only used 1 hour per day or so.

    city buses take 80-100 people, articulated buses about 150

Yes, but then they are not offering a ride that is better than a ride in a private car.

I have took an extensive look at this over the last weeks. A typical articulated bus can only carry about 20 to 30 passengers who are seated as comfortably as in a private car.

Partly that is because of the design of the buses. If the buses were redesigned to comfortably seat people, they could probably carry an additional 10 or 20 passengers who are comfortably seated.

My perspective is from living in a big city. Hamburg in Germany. Here it is like this:

    add additional time to travel to the bus stop

That is more than offset by the time and stress to find a parking place when you use a private car.

    add additional time to wait at the bus stop

I would guess the average wait time here is about 3 minutes.

    additional time for bus to stop at other bus stops

True, but decreases the more buses there are. The more buses, the less stops every bus has to do. And also decreases the better the planning via internet becomes. We have buses here in Hamburg, called "Moia" by Volkswagen, where you announce your starting and destination positions in advance, and the bus only stops where it has to.

    additional time to account for the bus taking a route
    that deviates from shortest path

True, but decreases the more buses there are. And the better we plan the routes via the internet with people announcing their route upfront.

Which city is that?

    bus travel is too slow 

I would expect travel to speed up when we move from cars to buses. Look at what cars do most of the time. Waiting at crossings, slowing down for crossings, accelerating after passing a crossing. I have not measured it yet, but I would expect buses that carry 20 passengers each to accelerate that by a factor of 10 or so.

    and unreliable

You mean when the bus is stuck in traffic? Don't you have the same problem with a car?

    people working 40h+

I would think people who work 40h would be happy if they could do their work in a nice electric bus with a table instead of spending that time handling a steering wheel.

I don't expect bikes to take market share from cars.

Bikes have been around for a long time and are expected to technically stay the same in the foreseeable future.

Electric buses are so much better than gasoline buses. Fewer vibrations, less noise. Makes it much more suitable to relax or do some work on your phone. Plus, the cost (manufacturing+maintenance+fuel) of electric buses is 25% lower than the cost of gasoline buses. At the moment, only 10% or so of buses are electric. So the effect of these two improvements are mostly still to hit the market.

And in a few years, buses will start to become autonomous. Which reduces the costs of a bus operation by 70%.

Imagine we get autonomous electric buses with nice seats and tables. Then you can do your work in a bus while getting from A to B super cheap. Mobility would be so different.

I wonder if this is an argument for more public transport.

Electric buses make rides pretty cheap and comfortable. And shifting traffic from personal cars to buses would make mobility much more efficient. Because in a bus, 30 people can cross a crossing so much faster than in a line of 30 individual cars.

Would privacy also be better? Because the government is more trustworthy regarding the collection of movement data than private companies?

I think a better solution than to "go offline" is to just turn the whole site into static content and leave it online forever.

I have been running a music discovery website for a similar timeframe as Watmm now:

https://www.gnoosic.com

And for about 10 years, it also had a forum:

https://www.gnoosic.com/discussion/

It was just too much work to keep the forum running. But I can't imagine removing it from the internet. I know that some people are still happy to find their old posts every now and then and read what they wrote back then.

What would be an example of a feature that can not be enabled via a checkbox?

Why does a to-do list have to have any features by default? It could be a blank screen with a "settings" sign in the upper right, where you can enable just the features you need.

If I don't find such a software, I will write it myself. I actually already started:

https://x.com/marekgibney/status/1844077244903571549

I am developing it on the side, while I try to get by with existing solutions.

Just tried it, and this is very much the opposite of what I am looking for.

What I would like is a very minimal layout. Basically with nothing on the screen. And I want to be able to organize my world by dragging, dropping, swiping recursive items.

Just tried it. Way too much stuff on the screen for my liking. Plus it seems to be not recursive.

Similar to my thoughts about Trello:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43068867

One issue I have with Trello is that it has multiple types of items. And that it is not recursive.

When I create an item "Supermarket" and then an item "Bread", I cannot drag and drop the item "Bread" into "Supermarket". But that is how I think. I have a lot of "items" and each item can contain other "items". I don't want any other type of object.

Another problem is that I cannot customize the layout. I can't remove every icon from the items in the list. I only want to see the item names, no other info like the icon that shows that there is a description or anything. But Trello seems to not support that.

To make any type of app really good is super hard.

I have yet to see a good to-do list tool.

I'm not kidding. I tried TickTick, Notion, Workflowy ... everything I tried so far feels cumbersome compared to how I would like to handle my To-Do list. The way you create, edit, browse, drag+drop items is not as all as fluid as I imagine it.

So if anyone knows a good To-Do list software (must be web based, so I can use it anywhere without installing something) - let me know!

Do files really prevent concurrent access?

And does git not need crash durability?

Hmm... is the mutability of data really enough to create a need for transactions?

For example here on HN (which afaik also stores the data in files) you can change a comment you wrote. But that type of mutability does not call for transactions, right?

Reading this again reminds me of the fact how beautifully git uses the file system as a database. Where everything is laid out nicely in directories and files.

Except for performance, is there any downside to this?

In other words: When you store data in an application that only reads and writes data occasionally, is it a good idea to use the git approach and store it in files?

I would say <style> in the body is so widely used that one can call it "generally accepted". Google, Amazon, Wikipedia ... look at the source of any website, and you will see a lot of <style> elements in the body.

The reason is that it often makes the structure of websites much more logical. Often you want to define a piece of content, its layout and behavior in one specific place, not spread out across multiple places. Then the best solution is to have a <style> element right before the other DOM elements for that piece of content.

And for the html editor, it saves the user from thinking about one more element (<head>) which does not do anything that is visible to the user.

That is pretty nifty!

My problem with 'data:' urls is that I have never found a way to add them to the homescreen on Android.

A sandbox could be an interesting idea. Especially as a dropdown with options what should be blocked.

I am not sure if anything should be blocked by default, because that could always end in frustration when something that should work does not for mysterious reasons.

But it might make a good default to block all external requests when the editor gets a feature to link to code directly. Like ...html_editor/?code=<!doctype html><html>...

Then it could display an info box like "Initial code was loaded from your link and the sandbox was activated. Use the Sandbox menu to enable more features the code can use"

There was a bit of a discussion about this on HN two months ago here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42448964

The editor is open source, so if you like, you can add the features you have in mind:

https://github.com/no-gravity/html_editor

I made this html editor with instant preview and it turned out useful when I show friends how make their very first html page:

https://no-gravity.github.io/html_editor/

Originally, I made it for myself. To quickly do HTML/CSS/JS experiments. And I still use it for that use case.

Often when I show it to non-developer friends, I can see how they light up to coding for the first time. I think it is because it is so accessible. No signup, no setup, no long page load. Everything is instant, and they see each change the moment they type it.

SQLite makes for a really nice document store with the json arrow functions. Assume you have a "book" column that is a json blob, then selecting the names of all books is just:

    SELECT book->>'name' FROM books;

The only thing I miss is auto increments.

Without an additional "id" column, inserting a new book with a unique id becomes cumbersome.

The stations would not have to be connected via data cables.

A phone has enough transmission power to communicate with a satellite?

I would think the electromagnetic waves the phone sends are going out in a sphere, right? Then the loss on the way to the satellite must be gigantic.

Do I understand it correctly, that the satellite communicates with a ground station and the ground station communicates with the phones?

It's not that the phone communicates directly with the satellite, right?

That's a cool idea.

So a simple return makes a newline, and two quick returns have a different meaning. I like that.

The way I support multiline is via the little triangle in the search bar. I think I'll keep it, because it is easier to discover. The double-return would need some kind of textual hint. Like when you press enter once, a little hint could pop up below the search area telling you that to leave the text entry, you can hit enter twice.

And on mobile I rarely use multiline searches I think. On the Desktop I use shift-return to create a newline.

Have you seen that you can customize the list of engines when you click "more engines"?

For now, if you have two engines in your list that start with the same letter and want to use the second one, you have to click on it.

I was thinking about changing it so that when you press the letter, then both engines lit up so you know you have to press another letter to select which one you want. So DeepL would be "de" and DuckDuckGo would become "du".

Not sure if it is a feature in high demand. If I get feedback from a user that they want it, I would implement it.

Not sure. I have not much insight into how people use it. Just like you, I mostly have built it (and keep building it) for myself. And yes, I also think it saves time.

I had a similar idea a while back and built Gnod Search around it:

https://www.gnod.com/search

You can enter a search term and then click on the button of a search engine.

Or you can just press the first char in the name of the engine. So you can search Google for "hello world" by typing "hello world<enter>g". And then go back and just hit "c" to send the same query to ChatGPT.

I wonder if it would be possible to do this in a way that the page shows its own source code.

Similar to:

https://no-gravity.github.io/html-quine/index.html

Could be tricky, because non-textual elements would probably have to be taken care of individually. For example a video would probably have to show a video of its own representation in code.

In theory, Bluesky, Mastodon, Pixelfed etc could offer a service where you drag and drop the button onto the Bluesky/Mastodon/Pixelfed website where you are logged in and sign the reaction in your name. And send the post with a signed message like "Peter Prima endorsed this page with a thumbs up emoji /signed: Peter Prima"

This way, the web would get a decentralized like system.