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The US attacking Venezuela before 2026 is now at 31% on metaculus.

https://www.metaculus.com/questions/39336/us-attacks-venezue...


Bit late for that, they've already murdered some random Venezuelans at sea.


I don't think that met either of the criteria:

> This question will resolve as Yes if, before January 1, 2026, the United States carries out a military attack against Venezuela's territory or military forces.


I've played football (soccer for Americans) with people who were very good who didn't watch the game at all. Similarly for basketball.

People watch sports because it gives them an emotional investment in something that has a new result each week, is not scripted and shows incredible skill and fitness.

It's also a lot healthier than the people who follow politics like sport. They get moral when their team loses.

Do you watch TV, Internet videos, film, or read books ?

That's just another form of entertainment.


Agreed. I'm actually not a tribal person by nature. So I never actually "identify" with any particular sports team. It's usually a per-race narrative that I latch on to.

Like this most recent F1 race, the main thing I cared about was that the Williams team got on the podium (1st, 2nd, or 3rd). Because they were a hugely successful team in my childhood, so I wanted to see them succeed again after 15 years of horrible performance, often finishing absolutely last.

Next week, it might be another narrative I latch onto during the race. It absolutely is entertainment for me. I rarely ever care about any single team.


The economic aspect is also worth considering.

The subsidy per passenger mile in the US is :

0.019 for road transport, 0.021 for air transport, 0.710 for Amtrak and 2.300 for transit.

From : https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=22592

Just also as a note, you can create suburbs pretty easily where bikes use paths or whatever. I live in a suburb where I can ride 15 kms to work without riding on roads. The subsidy for bikes would actually be really low.


You should look at Cost benefit analysis, there was one made on Copenhagen. [1] Bicycle infrastructure usually gets you 6x-12x on the invested amount, getting a 1.2 CBA is ok, 2 is amazing.

Bicycle infrastructure is often destroyed by those other investments and that is usually not counted as a con. But it is just too cheap to build bicycle infrastructure to be interesting.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218...


It's interesting to contrast to food trucks that are another method for more profitable places by reducing costs.

Food trucks seem to be pretty popular and work well.

Perhaps the difference is that food trucks are all about establishing a reputation for good cheap food that you can verify where as ghost kitchens wind up being the opposite.


Food trucks are also usually founded by a person with a vision and passion. Someone who wants to do something completely different with their life, a cook who thinks they have what it takes to go out on their own, etc, and that can be something that goes beyond even the reputational incentives.

Certainly not always, but I'd wager far more commonly than a generic ghost kitchen out of a shared kitchen with an Applebee's or out of the back of a cheap warehouse district.


In a food truck I can usually see the person cooking the food as well as the person giving it to me.

I will also eat the food close to the truck, meaning it's very little effort for me to go back and say "oi, this is shit, mate".

In a ghost kitchen you have zero way to actually give feedback to the kitchen itself.


A ghost kitchen is like an LLM or an ephemeral container, or any stateless instance. Even if you could impart some feedback, it would be gone by the next time you place an order.


Food trucks seem like they would involve more cost than a "ghost kitchen" and the branding on the truck especially will follow you around. If a ghost kitchen sucks, there is no cost in changing their name and maybe even their menu and continuing their bullshit. But there are real costs in re-branding and vinyling your food truck and food trucks deal with face to face business.


There is a BBC Audio drama of Neuromancer that is 1:56 long.

It is excellent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S89BHnaxULo

I haven't listened to the audio book of Neuromancer but I re-read it a few weeks back. The audio play I still go back to once in a while as well.


Two minutes hardly seems enough time to do the story justice.


1:56 here refers to the aspect ratio, meaning 1 high and 56 long. So it is actually really long.


Actually it is 1 wide and 56 high, as in 16:9.


lol, what? It's an hour and 56 minutes long is all.


it's 2 hours


"Some things happen, an space station happens, some AI happens, and in the end, our protagonist figures out that he's kind of insignificant despite being there for all of it."


You can do this in Python now with :

https://github.com/tcsenpai/pybooklid

here is an example that plays a sound via Pygame

https://github.com/Petess/MacLidPythonSound

This avoids having to deal with Xcode.


There is data for Australia as well that shows a similar decline.

It's worth looking at the road deaths data in wikipedia at :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...

The road toll of 1266 in 2023 and 4.8 fatalities per 100K residents is and comparing it to 1970 where it was 3,798 and 30.4 per 100K residents.

Even the trend on deaths per 100K residents is down from 8.15 per 100K residents in 2003 and has declined to 4.4 in 2023.

In terms of road fatalities per billion kilometres driven it's down from 44 per billion kilometres traveled in 1971 to 4.4 in 2020.

It's really interesting to see how many single vehicle accidents there were and the breakdown of who was killed.

From : https://www.carexpert.com.au/car-news/australias-catastrophi... "48 per cent of deaths recorded were drivers, while 20 per cent were motorcyclists, 16 per cent were passengers and 12.5 per cent were pedestrians.

304 women were killed over the 12 months, while the report recorded 956 male deaths. 792 deaths occurred during weekdays and 474 victims were killed over a weekend."

The breakdown on where the crashes happened is interesting

"A total of 326 people died in major cities across Australia, with 581 deaths in regional Australia and 63 in remote or very remote parts of the country."

Given that the vast majority of Australians live in major cities it's surprising.

It's really surprising how many accidents are single vehicle :

"Out of 1266 deaths, 490 victims were involved in multiple-vehicle road incidents, whereas 776 people who died were involved in single-vehicle crashes."

On top of this it should be added that in a review of fatalities in Victoria ~52% of the crashes involved a driver who tested positive for alcohol or drugs or both.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00014...

41% of fatalities are estimated to involve speeding.

https://www.transport.nsw.gov.au/roadsafety/topics-tips/spee...



Interestingly by the time it came into service the Me-262 could reach it.

B-29 service ceiling was 9710 m.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-29_Superfortress#Spec...

For the Me-262 the service ceiling: 11,450 m

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Me_262#Specifica...

The B-29 was an absolutely insane technical achievement. But it's also completely crazy to think that as soon as it was in service the Me-262 had made it obsolete. Also the German development of guided surface to air missiles. The US immediately had to build a pressurized jet bomber that would operate in a considerably tougher environment.

The US had began working on what would wind up as the B-52 that would fly 6 years later in 1951.

By that point you'd think that everything would keep changing.

Yet here we are almost 75 years later and the B-52 is still a US combat aircraft that is expected to stay in service until the 2050s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-52_Stratofortress

The pace of technological development is so crazy.


B-52 age is my favorite "yes, but" series:

Yes, but the B-52H still in use are very different from the ones built in 1951.

Yes, but the youngest B-52H was built in 1962.

So much closer to the days of the Wright Flyer than to the present day.


Could be the reason that the B-29 was never used over Germany.


The ME109 could also reach the service ceiling of the B-29


It's not solved in real life. It's a huge ask that it should be solved on the internet.

Where are good discussions between really different viewpoints anywhere?


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