Yes. Smartphone vendors and CC prefer that you use contactless rather than a physical Clipper card, then they have data on your transit use, also the CC network gets transaction fees.

FYI there was a very informative recent panel episode of Forum: "KQED Investigates Botched Clipper 2.0 Launch" (8/24/2026, audio + transcript)

> KQED’s Azul Dahlstrom-Eckman joins us to talk about his investigation into what went wrong. Clipper 2.0 – a revamp of the payment system used across the [Bay Area] region’s 22 public transportation systems. The new version was supposed to allow seamless rides between systems and coordinate discounts and other programs. But..."

https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101915014/kqed-investigates-b...

I'm also a fan of dedicated stored-value cards (they're generally much more robust during network or backend system outages), but I can really see the point of offering both in cities like New York or San Francisco.

Tourists trying to tap their credit or debit card and then arguing with the bus driver for a while, holding everyone up, used to be a quite common sight in SF.

I do use a contactless Clipper card, on my phone. I don't think this bit is relevant: getting Visa to correlate transactions is probably a lot easier for Waymo to get done than integrating with Clipper to see if you've ridden transit in the past two hours. That's the same if you use a physical card or one on your phone.

I didn't disagree with you. I'm saying the key findings in that Clipper 2.0 postmortem were much bigger than any single incentive program like this Waymo one would have been. Hence I can see why Waymo avoid integrating with Clipper.

It said "one of the most complex fare payment systems in the world: 22 different transit agencies across nine counties in the Bay Area... [with thousands of fare categories]" And it's a single-bidder $500m contract that was 3 years late.

Yes, two weeks ago on Sept 8. The UK calls their national ATC "NATS": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49786425

> BBM is pulling in vast audiences, ... estimated 64.7 million visits per month. According to a recent ranking, that would make it one of the 30 most trafficked English-language media enterprises on the web, with a total digital readership substantially higher than that of NPR, narrowly besting CBS News and Forbes, and just slightly behind the Washington Post... [but run by a] skeleton crew of about a dozen employees... more than 50 fake personas for nonexistent writers

BBM apparently took down the 50 fake personas in 2024 when it was challenged by reporters.

CFMEU sounded like some EU thing, but it's not, it's Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union (CFMEU), one of Australia's largest blue-collar trade unions.

inverse Gamma function of Avogadro's number (6.02 × 10²³) is ~ 24.99056

Sure, but "23.99067408! is Avogadro's number" is both harder to remember and less cool than "24! is almost Avogadro's number".

Sure. I wasn't disagreeing with you; just curious how close the coincidence was.

(I just undead'ed this comment; can't see why it was downvoted.)

I think you mean "using base C without any arbitrary-precision library (e.g. GMP)" . All that illustrates is that Lisp has built-in support for arbitrary-precision arithmetic, whereas C doesn't. Otherwise, how is this surprising, and what is the reason for the performance difference?

This is restating Stirling's approximation, which has been known for three centuries (1730, de Moivre 1721). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling%27s_approximation

Stirling’s approximation is mentioned in the article.

I know that, that was my point. I'm saying I don't see much point in restating it without adding something; it's been known for 300 years.

Compare to how different countries' justice systems treat really high quality money forgers.

no-true-Scotsman...