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In the last 500 years.


I was reading "The Victorian Internet" by Tom Standage and decide to build a proof of concept of an online telegraph.


This is so cool. Knowing nothing about Telegraph standards are there no explicit signals for symbols or spaces?


ITU Morse does specify punctuation marks and a few symbols, but they're rarely used in practice.

A space is denoted by a gap equal to seven dots.

https://www.itu.int/dms_pubrec/itu-r/rec/m/R-REC-M.1677-1-20...


Hi, I built this free tool to showcase Amazon Wishlist. I use the wishlists to manage my books. I dit the tool to showcase Amazon Wishlists in a cooler way than Amazon does. It's called zonlist.

It’s completely free, embeddable, and designed with privacy in mind—we don’t share any specific details from the list.

I thought that it may be useful for some of you. Luckily I can get some feedback.


Just a copy cat of the real app https://blockblastsolver.com


Dear leugim, our algprithm is different and more accurate.


Why it's everything NYT Bestseller non-fiction? I'm not a big fan of NYT Bestseller non-fiction but I find myself much better with novels matching my mood. If it's something older or classic, better.


The "enchanted" mood appears to be all fantasy fiction.


Good point here - and a lot is just left off the list if it doesn’t agree with the editors “beliefs” even if it’s really a bestseller in terms of sales.


I visited 4 airports that aren't in the list. Do you think I can add them to the list? Never committed before to OpenBSD so I do not know if I compute as a "OpenBSD developers" in "New airports can only be added by OpenBSD developers who have visited an airport and thereby have verified its existence."


Developers are categorized as people with commit access to the project. So contributing patches itself is not enough to add entries to this specific file.


I think maybe this could be workable if an OpenBSD developer were to visit you in person to verify your existence and thereby transitively verify the existence of the claimed "visited airport".


What if I know a guy who knows a guy?


I've checked and at least one airport is missing from the list that I've been too.



I'd say no. Lots of (successful) ideas have been dismissed by this community.

And that is okey.


But new trends are typically discussed here, before they hit the mainstream, even if they are dismissed.

Hacker News is good about surfacing new technology; Hacker News is bad about figuring out how that technology will be leveraged.


Can't forget the famous dropbox dismissal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224


Everytime that comment is referenced, people forget that the rest of comments were mostly positive plus constructive criticism or challenges they'd face.


Yes, and BrandonM's comment was constructive criticism. He was trying to help Drew with his YC application (that's what "app" meant back then) and clearly wanted it to succeed ("I only hope that I was able to give you a sneak preview of some of the potential criticisms you may receive. Best of luck to you").

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27068148

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275


Almost like the people claiming “bias” actually have their own biases.


I think that example really exemplifies HN's biggest blindspot. A lot of successful companies are built around taking an existing technology, then packaging it in a way that drastically reduces the frictions for the user. The typical HN user doesn't understand those pain point, because they're technically sophisticated enough that they're mostly invisible.

So, you take something like Dropbox. Yeah, it pretty much is just mounted FTP. And the average HN is looking at that and thinking "I could do the same thing with a bash script, what's the big deal".


It is a blind spot of knowledge. Sure you can make a script that does it. But most people can not do that. Heck just yesterday something in my hacked up system did something odd. It spit out an error that I will now have to research (probably find nothing) and then have to dig out the code on. Then spend several days probably reverse engineering some tech API that I have never seen before, in a style that will be different than what I am used to. But if I had bought a product that did the same thing. More than likely 50 other people would have the same issue and a few dozen work arounds. If those failed I could have a shot at just taking it to whoever sold it to me and saying 'fix it'. But as I hacked together something on my own. I own it, warts and all. I enjoy doing that but most people have zero idea where to even begin in fixing something like that. Buying something that 'just works' solves so many issues (and creates others).

Probably the biggest one that sticks out in my mind was when the iPad came out and all the tech boards like this were down on it. But it was what most people wanted to use a computer for. Most people did not want a computer. They wanted a media device. For many years the only way to get that was to get a computer. Now you can get that media device without most of the headaches of a computer.


I think Dropbox is only a blind spot because it took a syncing tool and combined with running a user application with root privileges in the 2000's era of computer security applications and gamification for user acquisition.

> Jobs had been tracking a young software developer named Drew Houston, who blasted his way onto Apple ’s radar screen when he reverse-engineered Apple’s file system so that his startup’s logo, an unfolding box, appeared elegantly tucked inside. Not even an Apple SWAT team had been able to do that.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2011/10/18/dropb...


It’s not a blindspot for many people. It’s open source and open protocols vs closed source spyware. SCP is far better than Dropbox if you value privacy for instance.

A lot of resistance to things like Dropbox come from the experience of being screwed over by closed source software. If you look at the state of Dropbox today, those initial comments look pretty spot on.



This one (on bit gold, a few months before the Bitcoin paper came out) is even more striking:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253999


what if the real train comes?


Direct quote from the site:

ALWAYS KEEP IN MIND, you should use railbikes ONLY on ABANDONED lines!!


Sounds like the disclaimer they use when selling e-scooters... ("this is not for the road etc.")


From the pictures, it looks like it has plastic guide wheels but if it were conductive to short out the two rails, it would activate the signals and any trains will be stopped before they reach you.


Do not ever rely on this sort of safety mechanism. There are also systems in use that rely on axle counters and bookkeeping - basically, on each block they count the incoming and the outgoing axles. When your draisine now is either too lightweight to trigger an axle counter or you set it on the rails in the middle of a block, the ops central won't know you are there.


Even simpler, there are systems that use a physical token.

To proceed into a section of track, the train driver/guard must physically possess an object, typically handed over at a station just before the section, and returned just after.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Token_(railway_signalling)


Never knew about axle counters. In the UK, they use a jumper cable to stop trains in an emergency.


While the UK has indeed stuck to almost exclusively using track circuits for a very long time [1], within the last two decades axle counters have become much more common.

[1] With some exceptions – the Severn Tunnel e.g. was switched to axle counters already in 1987 because track circuits proved too unreliable within the (wet) environment of the tunnel.


Or another Railbike travelling in the opposite direction?


Obviously you must stick to the schedule to allow for passing of oncoming or overtaking rail traffic at sidings.


The ones I've rode look like these[0], so in case they are running in different directions, you can easily lift up the one side with just one wheel on both vehicles, and then just push them. Simple and not a heavy lift either.

[0] https://hemomkringvandring.se/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/IMG...


Definitely an issue with personal rail travel, whether from the opposite direction or an unclearable traffic jam in the same direction, and whether two rails or mono.

See also: Shweeb - https://www.nzherald.co.nz/travel/shweeb-how-new-zealands-hy...


One of you gets off the track to allow the other to pass.

A normal bicycle can be lifted in one hand. This looks more unwieldy but not too much heavier. It shouldn't be hard.

(If two riders are both so oblivious that neither sees the other coming from at least a quarter-mile off, they deserve to crash.)


If it’s like the ones I’ve been on, you either lift them off the rails, or if you’re just hiring them, sometimes just both turn yours the other way and swap.


Then you stop, take one off the rails and swap positions.


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