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I'm not sure the SR is really that large of a paradigm shift.

All Einstein did, I know that conceptually this was a large leap and just saying "all he did" is doing him a severe disservice for his contributions, is note that the mass of an object is dependent upon the speed of the object. Such that for velocities that are not an appreciable fraction of c we can use Newton's laws of gravitation perfectly well.

TLDR; Einstein did not replace Newton, he tweaked him.


The RM runs on linux and they hand you the admin password. I'm not sure how much more open you can get. Just SSH into the device and then use one of the 3rd party stacks for syncing.


No I get it and loved the RM open source community. I was involved with that a few years ago. At the time the SaaS stuff was new and I personally thought they should have gone the other way and doubled down on a fully open stack, but then I kind of moved on to other things and haven't kept up with what has happened since, and whether they were doubling down on closed source/SaaS or the opposite.


I do agree them pressing the SaaS angle feels bad. Once I found out about the stack that the RM is built on I was blown away, I definitely had a moment of "why are they hiding this?". I told a few others in my office (we're software engineers) and everyone was completely unaware that this was an option. They really do bury the capabilities of the hardware.

It feels like a tax on the less technical/informed.


> Once I found out about the stack that the RM is built on I was blown away, I definitely had a moment of "why are they hiding this?"

Right?? I mean, their tech is amazing. They are clearly cream of the crop, passionate, engineer craftspeople. They should be the anti-Apple and be extremely open. RaspberryPi style.


Good news for you! The ReMarkable is build on Linux and you can direct access to the whole system via SSH!! They even give you the su password so you can do _anything_ you want with it!

You can break the custom integrations that they created or even brick the whole device.

But nothing is stopping you from logging into the system and modifying anything you want. There's actually a whole ecosystem of 3rd party mods and software for the ReMarkable!


Oh, the marketing gave me a much different impression. How far does it go, do you know if you can get a different distro on there?


You probably could, but you'd have to find a way to port the display stack or write your own.

Edit: here's one of the big sites for 3rd party software for the remarkable https://toltec-dev.org

Edit2: Here's someone running doom on the RM https://www.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/gkktxy/de...


This is entertaining to game out the idea that anything that happened digitally more than 7 years ago just disappears. A rolling Nothing that just eats anything that's 7 years in the past. A Great Oubliette into which we just toss anything from 7 years ago.

I think this would make an interesting dystopian novel.


Why stop at digital data? All memories roll into nothingness at 7 years, to be replaced by whatever the brain is forced to put in their place to resolve any apparent dissonance. A select few have discovered the secret and used it to build unimaginable power (e.g., building armies by promising riches and wealth after an 8yr term, using the Greate Oubliette to convince recruits they only have 1 yr left for the entirety of their lifetime of service).


There's a project called DizqueTV[0] that lets you set up "channels" of media to be streamed to a Plex server, which then lets you send that onto a TV.

It's not quite the same as straight TV channels. But it's pretty close!

[0]: https://github.com/vexorian/dizquetv


I spent some 13 years working for a manufacturing firm writing custom management software for a similar sized manufacturing company. I now work for a SaSS firm in a different industry with a few hundred clients.

The thing that I learned from this is you either buy off the shelf software and run your company the way that the software company thinks you should run your business. You can, like some of our clients, fight the software and figure out all the janky work arounds you want, but ultimately you are bound by that software.

Or, you can write your own software and run your company the way you want it to run, with all the weird quirks of your business.

I get why smaller companies/firms buy software instead of rolling their own. It's a huge amount of overhead for little apparent benefit. It's worse when the software vendor isn't helpful or attentive to your needs.

My gut would be to say find a few software engineers you trust, hopefully with experience doing EDIFACT files (I've done this myself and the specs are a bear to dig through). I have this feeling mostly due to the unresponsive software vendor and your operating in a small niche.

For attracting talent, pay them well, and make them feel appreciated, and listened to. You'll be running a tight ship with very few points of failure (the bus factor), just one or two people leaving could paralyze your operation. You don't want the software people to start looking for jobs elsewhere in such a small department. My previous employer did not do well in that department and lost 90% of their software staff in a 3 year time span. And when your department is 4-5 people that's devastating.


I don't want to be snarky, but I do seriously wonder how many people really cared about calculus when Newton/Leibniz developed it. It honest couldn't have been more than a handful because Newton slept on it for the better part twenty years.

I honestly think Math as a field has always been defined by "problems that only a handful of people care about".

The only exception I can think about is maybe basic addition and multiplication.


Yes, exactly. A whole lot of math problems were not interesting until we got relatively fast digital computers as they would have taken till the end of the universe if done by hand. Then suddenly it becomes a product you can implement in a library and perform simulations of reality on. Now suddenly a lot more people are interested in the math because improving the algorithm could lead to millions in power saving, or it could lead to far higher accuracy.

Simply put, it's very hard to predict the usefulness of math at the time it's created.


So if every car is following the speed limit, that is going as fast as they are allowed, why would any one person be passing someone else?


I often find myself behind a truck that is kicking up stones or belching fumes or has a poorly secured load that looks like it could fly off. Doesn't matter if it is going the speed limit, I want to get past it.


If this really was your problem you'd lower your speed for a few seconds, gain a safe 500 meters between you and the truck, and finally arrive at your destination about a minute later than you would if you were just in front of it.


I actually do this often. But in general if I put 500 meters in front of me, I'll have a series of impatient cars overtaking me from behind to fill the gap. So there is still (often dangerous) overtaking happening, thanks to the behavior of other road users in general. And when people overtake, if their speed is restricted to the speed limit they'll be facing oncoming traffic for longer than necessary.


How close do you find yourself to the truck in front of you?

Safe follow distances are, At 65MPH, I'm assuming you're in the US, is approximately 300 feet. I'd be kind of shocked that you're getting stones hitting you and detectable fumes 300 feet away.


My Adaptive Cruise Control has 4 distance settings and I use the 3rd, further than most people's following distance, and I've had stones kicked up by truck tires that hit my windscreen from that distance.


I do the same in my Subaru, even at the furthest, the safe distance is choose is no where near the 300feet(approximately 20 car lengths). It's closer to 8 car lengths.


Was curious so I just looked up my car's ACC numbers. Setting 3 is 1.8 seconds and setting 4 (the max) is 2.3 seconds, so about 220 feet at 65mph. As another poster said its pointless to be this far back because everyone else just overtakes you to fill the gap, so you're always braking and accelerating and averaging a smaller distance than in setting 3.


Clearly you’ve never driven in the EU. The usual follow distance here is about three meters, the “safe” one is five, any farther and you’re going to get a stream of cars overtaking you just to fill that void :)

Regarding stones and lose cargo, they would hit you even 300m away as they bounce and quickly lose speed while you’re still flying into at them at 130km/h.


To be honest, I have driven in the EU, but really only on a technically. I rented a car when I visited a Spanish island and really only drove a hundred or two km.

That said, I'm not talking about what people do, I'm talking about what is considered safe.


If it can't be practiced it doesn't matter what would theoretically be safe.


Don't generalise the whole EU when you know it's obviously wrong.


In most EU countries(and UK) you have different speed limits based on the class of the vehicle.

So for example in the UK on a single lane road a regular car can go 60mph, a car towing a trailer can only go 50mph, but a heavy goods vehicle(over 7.5 tonnes) can only go 40mph.

So on most roads that aren't dual carriageways you constantly encounter a situation where everyone is driving at their top legal speed limit but there is still a need to overtake vehicles.


Under that scenario, assuming 10-20mph differential is sufficient, overtaking by faster-class vehicles hasn’t been affected. Slower vehicles presumably shouldn’t be overtaking anyways, except when dealing with… even slower vehicles (but the joys of trucks overtaking each other by like 2mph difference and blocking the whole road for 10 minutes)


Roads commonly carry traffic at a different speeds than listed speed based on actual conditions, perception of conditions, condition and nature of vehicles and because speeds are often set inefficienctly.

Its not uncommon to see stretches with traffic constantly packed 4+ lanes going 75+ each way.

Trying to put the same burden of vehicles through at 65 with 300 ft between would be a joke. A given lane would carry less than half actual traffic. Bad traffic would become a city wide disaster.

Then consider that you can only impose this on a portion of drivers per year and drivers have to drive with those without governors indefinitely.

You also discount issues with safety by following at an appropriate distance. Trying to fall back 300 ft can only be achieved by driving too slow leading to both passing and people taking this new huge space whist giving you the finger leaving you with even less space.


If we're concerned with traffic throughput then shouldn't we just increase the allowed speed? Why even have a limit in the first place?

I don't understand your point about having to slow down to follow at a safe distance. If I pull onto a highway and find myself _right_ behind someone I can decrease my speed by one or two mph to fall back to a safe following distance. How is that not safe? The car behind me, who should already be either already at a safe distance or adjusting their own distance should have no issues here.

What I think you mean to say is that because you're assuming that everyone else on the road is behaving in an unsafe manner you believe that you, too, have to behave in an unsafe manner. This simply is not the case.


I'm not sure where you are driving (or if you drive anywhere) but you can't actually drop speed substantially with cars right behind you and if you tried to open a space people would just move into that space. Then you don't have that space AND you have cars maneuvering around you. You will have drastically increased your chance of having an accident without acquiring a buffer.

Areas that are already burdened as far as the amount of traffic they can bear, which is basically every major urban area in America, see traffic moving at a high rate of speed with 20-30 feet between cars.

Picture a simple chute in which you are dumping jelly beans one at a time. Even at the same speed of descent you will be able to drop 1/3 of the beans if you wait 3 seconds between drops instead of 1. Everyone trying to keep 300 feet between to be "safe" would create an expanding parking lot behind that would crash the entire traffic systems ability to function at all.

When everyone started arriving 3 hours late for work businesses would fine themselves dysfunctional including critical businesses. People would die because emergency vehicles couldn't move. The mayor would be on TV discussing what they would do about the collective insanity.

Anyway this is an awfully long way to say people do need the ability to control the speed of their car in order for the current flawed highway system to function normally. People do actually have cause to pass. They sometimes do have a reason to drive slower than the limit. Others need to exceed it briefly or in an emergency.


Perhaps parent isn’t talking about that scenario. But surely you can imagine a different scenario where this applies, right? Maybe Grandma Jones doing 10 under the limit on a two-lane road?


They're either so slow that they're easy to overtake, or they're so fast that it doesn't matter to stay behind for a while.

So just relax, the time lost is minuscule.


I’m in the US. If you’re on say hwy 395 heading to Mammoth Mountain, the highway is frequently one lane in each direction. If the max speed limit is 70mph, you may come up on a semi truck doing 60mph and you will want to pass using the lane with on coming traffic. This means you need to do 85mph to pass. For this reason our max speed limit laws are woefully inadequate at accounting for real life conditions.


Why will you _want_ to pass? Is that 10mph going to get you there _that_ much faster?

If you were to follow that truck for all 1300 miles of 395 you would get to your destination 3 hours later than if you were going 70mph the whole way.

I would doubt that anyone would want to drive for nearly 19 hours straight, unless you're doing some sort of cannonball run like challenge.

If your destination is a mere 120 miles away, and you followed him the whole way you'd get there only 18 minutes faster. Was it really that important to get there that much faster?


Do you have experience with such roads?

I do - we used to not have real highways 10-20 years ago. And the main issue with not overtaking a car-truck that is going just 60 (in your case) is that sooner or later they will encounter someone going 40-50, and they may not be able to overtake. And because of that uou end up driving 40mph on a 70mph road for hours.


I mean, I have been driving for the last 30 years of my life, I've driven most of the north east of the US. Through highways, timber roads that are little better than muddy paths, country roads that have never been paved, and pretty much everything in between. I've driven 15 hours straight. I've driven up mountains and across (really small) rivers.

Between all the vehicles I've driven in my life I've accrued, got I hate that I know this number off the top of my head, around 350k miles.

So yeah, I do have experience with such roads.


> I've driven most of the north east of the US.

Then you have no idea what the rest of us are talking about. Western roads are huge, and travel times are long. When you're driving the ~1000 miles between Denver and Los Angeles, 10 mph difference in speed can make your trip up to 2 hours longer. That's not insignificant, especially if you're trying to do it in a single day.


I'm sorry, did you want an exhaustive list of the roads I've driven? How many times I have driven out west? Which routes? For how long? That's a ridiculous thing to expect from a random on a forum. Should I list out all of the 10+ hour trips I've driven to satisfy you? What level of experience would cause you to retract your simplistic dismissal of my option?

Also, you did not read my post. I specifically said that over the course of those long miles 10mph will cost you 2-3 hours. I literally said that in my post.

You also missed the part where I suggested that no one should be driving for 21 hours, let alone 18.

Let me be clear, trying to drive 1000miles in one day is unsafe.


> Let me be clear, trying to drive 1000miles in one day is unsafe.

500+500 with two drivers.


Exactly, I have done 1,600 miles straight through. (3 drivers in shifts)


It's not always about getting there "faster". I regularly encounter trucks with unsecured loads, drivers visibly weaving, and other dangerous situations. I'm certainly not going to die on some "well this is the speed limit" hill behind them.

Driving isn't some binary situation, you have to constantly predict erratic behavior and react to your surroundings.


You can always go slower and give yourself sufficient braking distance.


> Why will you _want_ to pass? Is that 10mph going to get you there _that_ much faster?

Actually yes. That truck that's going 60 on the flats is going to be doing much less than that on the hills. Best for everyone involved to pass when it's safe. It increases safety and decreases road utilization.

Keep in mind that 3 hours @ 60 mph is 3 hours with another car on the road. To compensate you'd need another lane for 180 miles, not cheap. Also the rush of passing when a truck slows down is avoided. Additionally it's safer to pass when the speed differences are lower.

Seems better for everyone involved to let cars pass. It's much easier and safer to predict conditions for half the time when passing at +20mph then trying to predict twice as long when passing at +10mph.


> Best for everyone involved to pass when it's safe. It increases safety and decreases road utilization.

How does it increase safety? Someone else will just catch up to him on that hill.

> It's much easier and safer to predict conditions for half the time when passing at +20mph then trying to predict twice as long when passing at +10mph.

If safety is your concern, then it's even easier and safer to predict conditions without passing until a passing lane opens up, or a turn out is reached for him.


> How does it increase safety? Someone else will just catch up to him on that hill.

Instead of having an ever growing queue of cars that try to pass on the hill, they pass before hand on the flats. So there's not mass chaos when 100 cars who have been trying at 10 mph under the speed limit for an hour all try to pass on the uphill, while the truck is slowing from 60-40.

> If safety is your concern, then it's even easier and safer to predict conditions without passing until a passing lane opens up, or a turn out is reached for him.

Sure, some do that, it's the drivers choice. Personally if passing is allowed, I like to pass slower vehicles. My car accelerates quickly, so I like to pass quickly and spend the minimum amount of time in the oncoming traffic lane.

Just seems natural to let the cars get ahead whenever they can, after all the cars usually have a different speed limit than the trucks. Thus the carefully engineered lane markers, truck specific speed signs, and often passing lanes on the hills.


The minimum amount of time in the oncoming lane is 0


Sure. But now you have to spend more money on adding lanes for the same traffic capacity because the average speed drops.


Road capacity usually increases as speed goes down.


Cars per mile, yes. Cars per second no. If you follow the recommended 3 second spacing then it's a car per 3 seconds per lane.

So for a fixed distance, the slower you go, the longer you are on the road, the more road capacity you consume.


Traffic flow is more stable at lower speeds, so you get less congestion.


A lot of hills have passing lanes _specifically_ for this issue.

By that logic, that the time vehicles are on the road are necessarily limiting capacity of the system, then we should be vastly increasing the speed limit! Why not 100mph? 120mph?

I mean, it's only 3 times the kinetic energy (over 70mph), so any crash would be that much more dangerous/deadly. It's also very wasteful with respect to fuel, so you'd need to stop more often which would decrease your average speed.

Regardless, all of you all drive way too fast as is. It's not safe, it's not efficient.


> A lot of hills have passing lanes _specifically_ for this issue

Sure, but not 100%.

I'm not arguing that speed limits are useless. Just that the speed limits have always been for steady state driving. You can drive all day at them and never get a speeding ticket. However in the interest of safety you should be able to exceed them to pass, this gets the pass over more quickly and is safer and less frustrating for everyone involved.


> A lot of hills have passing lanes _specifically_ for this issue.

You'll often see heavy truck that's not only slow uphill but also slow downhill, in some cases even more so - because it can't afford to build up speed above what its breaks can handle.

And these passing lanes are _never_ in downhill direction.


>> then we should be vastly increasing the speed limit! Why not 100mph? 120mph?

I mean, Poland has 90mph speed limit on motorways and yet it's still safer than US which generally has very low speed limits everywhere. The only reasonable conclusion is that safety isn't directly correlated to the speed limits but to the state of infrastructure, driver training and culture.


> Was it really that important to get there that much faster?

The answer may be contingent on how many tacos you ate before this hypothetical trip.


This is the only answer that I've seen that's reasonable so far!


I pass slower drivers not to save a few minutes, but because driving fast is much more fun...


At least you're honest about it, thank you!


But now cars can drive 150 to 200mph. Putting the max speed at 85mph would already increase safety.


if the car is going slower than the limit but you have a very limited window of time to pass it, the only way is to temporarily go above the speed limit.


Slowing down isn't an option?


It almost always is, it’s just not what the parent post was discussing, check it out.


Well, you see, it's for the cases where not every car is going as fast as they are allowed.


If they're going so much slower than the limit that it's unsafe, wouldn't it be easy to pass at the regulated limit?

If they're going just a _little_ bit slower than the limit, why pass them? Are you telling me that 3kmph, or even 10kmph, slower than the limit is slow enough to make an appreciable difference to your everyday driving?


> wouldn't it be easy to pass at the regulated limit?

No. No, it's not, not on a single land road.


So the solution to a lane ending unexpectedly is to speed up? One would imagine that slowing down or even stopping would be the correct solution there.


Probably most of the time, but not every time. Which strategy is best in different situations cannot easily be predicted I'd imagine.


Stopping in traffic is almost never the safest option

If you are approaching and have room but someone is closing the gap, it may indeed be safer to speed up so you can take the spot before it closes and you are forced to stop

Granted, drivers should not be taking away the room you need to merge, but if everyone on the road were good drivers then we might not be seeking such nannying tech built into our cars to force them to drive better


If all vehicles are limited in the same way I am uncertain how this could even happen.

If the computer enforced max speed is 120km, and I'm going 120km, and the vehicle coming up is also going 120km, they can't overtake you, they can't close the gap.

Maybe, if the vehicle ahead of both of you is going much slower than either of you then yeah, they could close the gap. But even in that situation you could speed up to the max speed, matching that of the approaching vehicle, and merge. You'd still need to slow down to match the vehicle ahead, but so too would the one behind you, regardless of what you were going to do.


> If all vehicles are limited in the same way I am uncertain how this could even happen

This won't happen unless it becomes illegal to drive un-limited vehicles entirely though

People will drive older un-limited vehicles, or import un-limited cars from elsewhere, or buy limited cars and jailbreak them...

You're starting with a flawed premise and then concluding what you prefer


You're adding on a whole lot of edge cases onto an edge and coming to a conclusion that you think is best.

Some guy is shutting you out of the lane next to you, slow down and merge behind them.


Speeding up to merge with traffic that is moving faster than you is not an edge case :/


Okay, but that's not the scenario that was being discussed.


The statement of the argument is classic Dualism. I am pretty sure that Dennett is setting up the scene in order to poke holes in the said argument.


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