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It doesn't because it doesn't use any mainline rail track. Imagine if the T-Third went onto the Caltrain tracks at Bayshore and continued down the peninsula instead of terminating at Sunnydale; that would be a tram-train.

It would also be more or less impossible under current US regulations, but there's always hoping that that could be fixed.


It would reduce both capacity and speed. That would put a slow, low-capacity tram on the same track as a fast train line with large trains.

Current Caltrain equipment: [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUEZ6uuM_EA


Tram trains are mostly meant to give lightly used train lines a new lease of life with a substantially more convenient urban alignment, since for historical reasons legacy rail lines tend to skirt around downtowns and avoid where most of the jobs and people are.


That is not just a capacity and speed issue, it is also a safety issue. You don't put "light rail" and "heavy rail" on the same track, because a collision will be catastrophic to the light rail.


You can in Europe (and now in the US since 2018) because realistically, everybody is screwed no matter what kind of high speed collision happens, and in both regulatory frameworks it is substantially safer to simply have signalling and automatic emergency stops to prevent collisions in the first place (ETCS in Europe and PTC in the United States), and then to outfit train cars with better safety technologies like anticlimbers and crumple zones.

We stopped requiring buff strength in automobiles as the only thing a long time ago because it turns out that mostly just resulted in the cars surviving and the people inside them dying. Try throwing a steel box full of eggs and see what happens to the eggs.


I love this footnote so much:

> This feature does enable a neat quine: the Perl program “Illegal division by zero at /tmp/quine.pl line 1.”, when saved in the appropriate location, outputs “Illegal division by zero at /tmp/quine.pl line 1.” The reason for this behavior is left as an exercise for the reader.


The part that left my office in stitches:

> (To be fair to Perl, when perl is run with the -w flag to enable warnings, it does helpfully inform the user that at some point in the future, the Perl developers will most likely pick gggijgziifiiffif as a new reserved word:

>> Unquoted string "gggijgziifiiffif" may clash with future reserved word at - line 1.)


Knowing Larry, I believe he is currently working on a patch.


Larry left perl5 about 15 years ago, and nobody every will reserve random keywords like this. Keywords are very problematic in perl5 and are not needed all. You can add random new keywords at runtime, and you can add methods doing almost everything, like accepting blocks or functions, implementing most control structures.


     $ perl -MO=Deparse -e "Illegal division by zero at /tmp/quine.pl line 1."
    'division'->Illegal('zero'->by('at' / 'tmp' / 'quine' . line'->pl(1)));
     -e syntax OK


It's trying to divide "Illegal division by zero at /" by "tmp/quine.pl line 1." and "tmp/quine.pl line 1." evaluates to 0?


It is slightly more complicated than that :-) https://fanf.dreamwidth.org/131318.html

the actual parse is

  division->Illegal(
    zero->by(
      ((“at” / “tmp”) / “quine”)
       . line->pl(1.0)
    ))


I think it's equivalent to something like

  Illegal::division(by::zero(at/tmp/quine . pl::line(1.)))


Or "quine.pl line 1." Evaluates to 0?

Or should that be 0.0???


Yeah, I think it's both divisions. Both 'perl -e "in /tmp"' and 'perl -e "tmp/quine"' result in the same division-by-zero error.


> This feature does enable a neat quine: the Perl program “Illegal division by zero at /tmp/quine.pl line 1.”, when saved in the appropriate location, outputs “Illegal division by zero at /tmp/quine.pl line 1.” The reason for this behavior is left as an exercise for the reader.

For quines, see the chapter "Air on G's String", a dialogue between Achilles and the Tortoise in Douglas Hofstadter's book GODEL,ESCHER,BACH: AN ETERNAL GOLDEN BRAID.


This article lost me at "Most homes are not wired to handle 120kW chargers, which are likely not cheap to set up."

If the author had done any research, he'd realize that there's no such thing as a 120 kW home charger. (The weasel word "likely" only confirms the lack of research.)


And, of course, you almost certainly wouldn't want the extra expense of one if they were available anyway, because if your car is already at home it's pretty unlikely that you need it charged up again in the next 20 minutes.


I think the main thing electric cars need in order to win, is the ability to recharge anywhere. Slow is fine, but if it can charge during every lunch break and rest stop, that still adds up. I'd rather have a slow charger on every single parking space than a network of superchargers.


It can. You can plug a Tesla into any 110 outlet. (It's just 4x slower than a 30A/220).


I think the spirit is most homes are old and dont have the wiring to handle the load, whatever it may be.


Were they confusing kWh with volts AC?


According to Apple's support site (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206587), the range of computers that support 4K at 60 Hz is a bit bigger:

- MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015)

- MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014)

- Mac Pro (Late 2013)

- iMac (27-inch, Late 2013) and later

- MacBook Air (Early 2015)


Good to know! I think I must have been recalling the figures for the latest pro models (2015 or 2016?) rather than all models. So, it only makes sense to get this model if you need the newest model AND 4k support :)


Late 2013 MBPro 15" can do it too.


I have the same machine you do and I ordered the new machine as soon as I could. Two external 5K displays is a huge unlock for more productivity.


All airlines do this, all run by the same vendor: http://www.rewardsnetwork.com/earn/


Precedent: Facebook paid Caltrain a bunch of money to clean up those tracks a few months back.

http://www.caltrain.com/projectsplans/Projects/Caltrain_Capi...


When I read

> This means when you install Babel it will no longer transpile your ES2015 code by default.

what I really see is "This means that Babel no longer works out of the box and is now harder to use."

Was any thought given to how much additional complexity this adds to what was previously (https://babeljs.io/docs/setup/#babel_cli) a very simple way to get started?


Keep reading the blog post, we introduced presets for this very reason. It not hard to setup at all.


To quote Jamie Jawinsky (Jwz):

>You have invoked the "Oh, but there's a setting to turn off that stupid behavior" defense. I am showering you with negativity.


You must really enjoy going through threads to say the same negative thing over and over. This is exactly why I can't stand Hacker News.


I've posted two comments discussing default behavior. Too many ("over and over")? And I can see several others raising the same issue in this very thread -- all wrong to focus on that issue?

My main concern was raised in the longer thread with you. It is negative because I don't see this as a positive move. Nobody explained why changing the default behavior is a good move (even if it's easy to add back), or what it has to do with a desire for modular internals (since those don't preclude that).

In any case, Babel has been a valuable tool and I really hope this direction comes out for the best.


i think it's entirely ridiculous it will do nothing unless you specify a preset. a default preset is likely what most users would expect


Meh, that's becoming less and less true. We're definitely never going to do that again.


Not too hard, but still harder than before.


The positives outweigh the 37 extra keystrokes you have to make to do the exact same thing as before.


What was the downside to doing the same thing as before by default?


There's a pretty lengthy discussion about it here https://github.com/babel/babel/issues/2168

I may do a followup blog post about it.


Backwards compatibility? Keeping with users expectations? Sensible defaults? Where's the fun in that?


Comcast does this under the "xfinitywifi" network name as a default setup for anybody who uses the standard cable modem/router-in-one box, with thousands and thousands of access points: http://wifi.xfinity.com/



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