Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | pclmulqdq's commentslogin

AGI is easier than getting New York City to complete an infrastructure project in less than a decade or less than a billion dollars.

The corruption and graft run so deep you would have to literally murder a lot of people to get that to happen.


Why is NYC so corrupt when large cities like London, Munich, and even Paris are much less so?

They are just as corrupt and/or incompetent. Have you tried Deutsche Bahn recently?

Yes. That's exactly my point.

The people who use something should pay for its upkeep. It doesn't matter if that makes it a "regressive" tax. If you are a daily user of a road, you should pay more for its upkeep than someone who doesn't use the road.

Why should a delivery driver pay the toll for the road to my house, and not me? Why should I be able to exploit flat-rate product pricing like that and skim some money from all customers of the delivery service?

Why should I pay the toll to drive to a friend's house? They're the one getting the benefit out of having easy access to transportation.

What if my taxes pay for all the roads in my town, while the neighboring town chooses to implement tolls instead? Why should I get double-taxed? Prisoner's dilemma and race-to-the-bottom?

Why should I have to deal with having my license plate stolen, and police time wasted (who are paid out of taxes), because of people who don't pay the tolls?


Delivery driver passes that costs of delivery on to you, so you do pay.

Why stop there? Why should I pay for my own food, given that my employer, friends, and family benefit from me being well nourished?

If that's the case, trucking companies should be paying 99.99% of taxes to maintain roads. They are responsible for almost all of the deterioration.

https://www.gao.gov/products/109954


>The people who use something should pay for its upkeep.

Fee-for-service city parks? Public libraries? Fire departments? Sidewalks? What about investing in the "public good"?


Public good? That sounds ripe for disruption. Won’t somebody please think of the shareholders!?

>The people who use something should pay for its upkeep

Why? That doesn’t seem like a good way to run society.


There are several states that have an EV registration surcharge that replaces gas tax. It's not popular with the pro-EV crowd.

it's pretty silly to have a tax that incentivizes the opposite behaviour to what you want. registration surcharges benefit the people who drive the most, at the expense of the people who drive the least.

if you're trying to pay for wear and tear on the roads, or reduce congestion, making people feel like they have to "get their moneys worth" on the registration surcharge really isn't helping.


I'm fine with a decently fair registration tax to offset the gas taxes, but the one in my state is the equivalent of 1,000 gallons of gas for the state gas taxes. If the car was a 35mpg hybrid that would be 35,000mi of equivalent driving. This is incredibly unfair.

35,000 mi of driving is not anywhere near out of the question if you're a daily commuter who takes road trips once in a while. If you're driving a truck or a non-hybrid, it's also a lot less mileage. It sounds like this is actually close to what you would be expected to use.

Just because a small percentage of drivers drive that much each year doesn’t make it a reasonable number for the general case.

It sounds like this is actually close to what you would be expected to use.

Not even close to what the average driver drives.


The average American driver gets about 25 mpg and drives about 15-20k miles. That's exactly in line with the tax rate here.

The average American car does not drive 20k miles. 12,500 is the average yearly mileage.

And it's an EV, a closer comparison should be something more like a hybrid. It's not a giant truck.


But it weighs as much as a giant truck

It weighs about as much as the smallest base model F150. Optioned out models and other trim levels easily hit 1,000lbs+ heavier.

Meanwhile that base model equivalent weight F150 gets about 24mpg and thus pays about half as much gas tax while doing the same amount of damage driving the average mileage. Further proving my point, I pay twice the state fuel tax for an equivalent weight pickup truck. Is that fair?

But also, isn't the whole point of the pickup truck to load it down? If all it's doing is carrying 1-4 people it's whole life, seems like a lot of waste. I'm told people buy trucks to actually load them down a lot and not just commute and get groceries? So while it's about the same weight dry and unloaded shouldn't it's weight really be quite a bit more in practice? Or are we all agreeing now trucks are just for commuting and getting groceries?


Seems unlikely.

55 miles/day, 365 days a year? Also, look at lease mileage limits.


Now you've moved the goal posts to about half of your original claim. And it's still not accurate (links have already been provided elsewhere in this thread). And the only thing I've owned in the last 30 years that gets 25 mpg is a camper van (and, no, that thing doesn't move anywhere near 15K miles/year).

> With that information, the British newspaper calculated that BEVs [battery electric vehicles] could expose roads to 2.24 times more damage than gas cars.

If that's true, then 12-15k miles in an EV would be equivalent to 27-33k miles in a gas car.. so "taxes equivalent to 35k miles" isn't far off.

Ref: https://www.autoevolution.com/news/bevs-could-also-damage-ro...


It's far away from the average of around 12,000. Few cars drive 35,000mi.

> With that information, the British newspaper calculated that BEVs [battery electric vehicles] could expose roads to 2.24 times more damage than gas cars.

If that's true, then 12-15k miles in an EV would be equivalent to 27-33k miles in a gas car.. so "taxes equivalent to 35k miles" isn't far off.

Ref: https://www.autoevolution.com/news/bevs-could-also-damage-ro...


The average driver also doesn't get 35 mpg driving regularly. The average driver probably gets around 20 mpg, and that would make this distance about 15000 mi.

The kind of people choosing an EV wouldn't get a 20mpg car, it's an unfair comparison.

They also chose a car that's extremely heavy (by virtue of the battery), so they create more road wear per mile than the average American car. The point is that tax rate seems fair.

The ICE I would have picked otherwise is only 100kg lighter and gets 40mpg.

And you’d be paying gas tax

Far less than what I'm paying with the EV, which is my point!

If I owned an ev for 3 years, the tax means I save money.

This is a yearly tax. So that would be the same as 105,000mi in three years meanwhile the average car probably only drove ~37,500 in that time period.

The EV tax applies to people who a) casue a disproportionate amount of wear & tear on the roads vs ICE vehicles and b) are generally higher income in the state.

When you look at taxation from a "charge the people who use it" or the "the rich should pay more" perspective, this appears to address both.

Is the problem simply that you want to pay less taxes?


> casue a disproportionate amount of wear & tear on the roads vs ICE vehicles

If it was, it would be based on vehicle weight and distance driven. Where I am, at least, it's simply a tax on efficiency.


No, I just want to pay a fair amount of taxes. Honestly the gas taxes should be increased or we should move to a tax structure where it's mileage, weight, and emissions based.

Paying 3x the same taxes while having less externalities isn't fair.


As I've cited elsewhere on this thread:

> With that information, the British newspaper calculated that BEVs [battery electric vehicles] could expose roads to 2.24 times more damage than gas cars.

Ref: https://www.autoevolution.com/news/bevs-could-also-damage-ro...

If that's true, then 12-15k miles in an EV would be equivalent to 27-33k miles in a gas car in the externalities of road wear & tear.. so "taxes equivalent to 35k miles" is at most 25% higher in a "damage per mile equivalent" but could be as little as 6% using the averages.

If your actual mileage is over 15625/year, then you're paying less than the equivalent.

What's your annual mileage?


12-15k miles in a Ford SuperDuty is equivalent to how far in a gas Civic? I suspect that driver isn't being charged accordingly.

Registration fees are likely the same or close but when you factor in gas taxes (the original comparison here), the Ford is definitely paying more both based on fuel type and mpg.

More, sure. But not remotely proportional to the increased wear and tear from vehicle weight.

Possible. How far off is it?

Pretty far?

According to your link, an EV that is 700lb heavier => 2.24x damage

Civic: ~2900lb SuperDuty: ~5700-7600lb


What is the difference in taxes paid for an equivalent amount of damage?

I understand the point you're trying to make - and you may be right - but you're leaving out the math to demonstrate it.


Civic fuel economy is about 2x an unloaded SuperDuty, so the SuperDuty owner likely pays maybe a bit more than 2x in gas tax + registration.

+700lb (+25%) => 2.25x damage +2800lb (+100%) => ???x damage

Your story doesn't provide a formula, but seems obvious it is much, much greater than 2 - this isn't a linear relationship

And that's the very lightest SuperDuty model, unloaded.


Excellent, much more useful.

Not sure where you are but in Indiana, gas tax for unleaded is 36c while diesel is 62c so on a per-gallon basis, that's an additional +72% in taxes. Back of the envelope: Civic at 30mpg pays 1.2c/mile vs SuperDuty at 15mpg pays 4.13c/mile so the multiple is closer to 3.4 vs 2

So yes - assuming registration fees are comparable and mileage is comparable - the SuperDuty should pay more.


The lightest SuperDuty has a gas engine. Diesel SuperDuty fuel economy is a bit better, but the vehicle also weighs more and is likely to be carrying/pulling more. But regardless of whether the multiple is 2 or 3.4 or somewhere in between, it is a small fraction of the added road wear.

By the fourth power law, an unloaded diesel Superduty creates ~22x the road wear of a honda civic. Loaded can be 100x more.


27 isn't 35 no matter how many times you say it is.

> If your actual mileage is over 15625/year, then you're paying less than the equivalent.

The average is less than that by a decent bit, so more than half of US cars are paying more even with your unproven, contorted math based on some estimates done once in the 70s and never really looked into closely again.

It's also assuming the difference in weight. The closest hybrid I would have bought instead is only like 100kg lighter than my EV. And it gets like 40mpg, better than 35mpg.

It would also mean semi trucks should pay like 20,000x more in registration fees. Does this make sense?

> What's your annual mileage?

Less than 15k on that car (like most people), so even with your assumed math it's overpaying.


Semi trucks pay huge amounts in gas taxes because they guzzle gas like nobody's business. It's only the EVs that aren't paying for their road wear in gas taxes.

20,000x more in taxes?

Realistically speaking, they probably do. Do you know how much fuel they use and miles they drive per year?

Average class 8 truck (>33,000lbs) burns under 11,000GGEa year, ratio is 1GGE=1.13gal of diesel. So somewhere under 12,500gal of diesel on average, but we'll use that to lean even more in the truck's favor.

https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10308

Are you suggesting the average car burns less than 1 gallon of gas a year?

A 20mpg car driving 12,500mi (the average ICE in the US) would use 625gal of gas. So more like 20x, maybe 40x if the per gallon tax of diesel is double. Pretty dang far off from 20,000x.

And they're doing way more miles while being massively heavier, meaning incredibly more harm on the road than whatever EV you're thinking.


GGE: Gasoline gallon equivalent

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_gallon_equivalent>

(Most tractor-trailor rigs burn diesel rather than petrol.)


You keep repeating it, but it's reductive at best and incorrect as a general assumption.

Is there another model you'd recommend to estimate/compare road wear and tear?

1:1 is at least as good a default assumption.

Based on numerous studies, we already know it's not 1:1 so why bother starting with a default assumption that we know is wrong?

Do you have an alternative analysis? I'd love to check it out.


I don't agree with your base assumption here.

> Based on numerous studies

I do agree the relationship probably isn't linear, but the fourth power rule doesn't necessarily have numerous studies confirming it. It was a small collection of studies on road wear the US highway administration did in the 1950s and pretty much everyone has just gone with that. Other studies have pointed to it being less than previously thought.

https://discovery.ntroknowledge.com.au/discovery/fulldisplay...

Throwing even more weight against your 12,000mi is really 35,000mi equivalence.


Thanks for the insight but my claim was never "12,000mi is really 35,000mi"

Regardless, it would be interesting to see the actual number worked through to see what the equivalent EV registration fee should be if road damage/maintenance is the sole factor.


> If the car was a 35mpg hybrid that would be 35,000mi of equivalent driving.

> that's true, then 12-15k miles in an EV would be equivalent to 27-33k miles in a gas car.. so "taxes equivalent to 35k miles" isn't far off

You absolutely did suggest me paying taxes for 12k miles is practically the same as ~35k miles, you said it several times. That it's not far off. How else am I supposed to read that? You were so sure of it you mentioned it many times.

> Regardless, it would be interesting to see the actual number worked through to see what the equivalent EV registration fee should be if road damage/maintenance is the sole factor.

Sure, but it's likely far less than what I'm paying. As mentioned elsewhere, a similar weight unloaded F-150 pays half the taxes. So I'm at least paying double for similar weight vehicles, and yet you tell me it's really only 6%. But sure, tell me again how I'm really just paying my fair share and 12 = 35.


> If that's true, then 12-15k miles in an EV would be equivalent to 27-33k miles in a gas car in the externalities of road wear & tear.. so "taxes equivalent to 35k miles" is at most 25% higher in a "damage per mile equivalent" but could be as little as 6% using the averages.

^ As you quoted, I used the formula to estimate 12k would be equivalent to 27k and said paying taxes equivalent to be 35k miles is "at most 25% higher", neither of which is "12 = 35". Using their approach, I calculated 35k to be equivalent to 15625 specifically, again, not 12k.

If the underlying approach is wrong, we should replace it with something better.

Alternatively, the OTHER reasoning of "the rich should pay more" still applies, so I assume that's a factor here. Hoping States charge rich people (or high income earners, if you prefer) less isn't likely to work right now.


> Alternatively, the OTHER reasoning of "the rich should pay more" still applies, so I assume that's a factor here.

Once again, your assumption is incorrect. That base model F-150 that pays half the taxes costs more than my EV. The registration fee doesn't factor in income or valuation at all. A $100k Hummer EV pays the same as a $15k used Bolt. Meanwhile that Hummer EV is going to do a hell of a lot more damage to the roads than the Bolt.

It probably has more to do with the government being in the pocket of oil interests and acts accordingly.


You can if you just run PTP (almost) entirely on your NIC. The best PTP implementations take their packet timestamps at the MAC on the NIC and keep time based on that. Nothing about CPU processing is time-critical in that case.

Well, if the goal is for software running on the host CPU to know the time accurately, then it does matter. The control loop for host PTP benefits from regularity. Anyway NICs that support PTP hardware timestamping may also use PCI LTR (latency tolerance reporting) to instruct the host operating system to disable high-exit-latency sleep features, and popular operating systems respect that.

> The control loop for host PTP benefits from regularity.

How much regularity? If you sent PTP packets with 5 milliseconds of randomness in the scheduling, does that cause real problems? It's still going to have an accurate timestamp.

> instruct the host operating system to disable high-exit-latency sleep features

Why, though? You didn't explain this. As long as the packet got timestamped when it arrived, the CPU can ask the NIC how many nanoseconds ago that was, and correct for how long it was asleep. Right?


> PTP packets with 5 milliseconds of randomness in the scheduling

This should not matter, unless you are a 5G telecom operator running at a high frequency. Gaussian noise in the master is not important to PTP. Being a master is easier than being a slave.

If you are running PTP at 128 Hz like a telecom, delays that large might lead to slaves resetting their state machines, which would blow the whole thing up.

> The CPU can ask the NIC how many nanoseconds ago that was

The CPU can indeed ask the NIC what time it is, but then the CPU has to estimate how long ago the NIC answered the question. If the PCI bus is in L1, it will take 10s to 100s of microseconds (no hard upper bound; could be forever) to train up to L0. The host has to determine this delay and compensate for it, because PCI bus transition is much longer than the desired error in PTP. The easiest way is to repeatedly read the time, discard the outliers, and divide the estimated delay in half. This technique is used by various realtime ethernet stacks. You will note that this is effectively the same as disabling ASPM. This is also why they invented PCIe 3.0 PTM.


> You will note that this is effectively the same as disabling ASPM

You need to wake everything up for certain measurements, but you don't need to disable power saving wholesale.


"Well, if the goal is for software running on the host CPU to know the time accurately, then it does matter. "

I'm sorry, this is just moving the goalposts.

You said "It can't achieve better-than-NTP results without disabling PCI power saving features and deep CPU sleep states."

This is flat wrong, as pointed out.

Now you are pedantically arguing that some NIC's that do PTP hardware timestamping might also use a feature that some operating systems might respect.

That's a very far cry from "It can't achieve better-than-NTP results without disabling PCI power saving features and deep CPU sleep states".

In most cases, people would just say "hey i was wrong about that but there are cases that i think matter where it falls down".


I see nothing in your pair of unnecessarily belligerent comments that actually contradicts what I said. There are host-side features that enable the clock discipline you are observing, even if you are apparently not aware of them.

This is a really helpful contribution - if only everyone could be as smart as you.

If mine are somehow too beligerent for you, which is hilarious given how arrogant and beligerent your initial comment and responses come off as (maybe you are not aware?), then perhaps you'd like to actually engage any of the other comments that point out how wrong you are in a meaningful way?

Or are those too beligerent as well?

Because you didn't respond to any of those, either.


This is how most FPGA users interact with vivado/quartus these days.

One really wonders when reading some of the comments here…

I should have said "most _professional_ FPGA users" because I assume many people here who don't know this (including the author of the article) are not.

There is a trend among programmers to assume that everything supported by the syntax can be done. This is not even true in C++, but it's something people think. If you are writing synthesizable SystemVerilog, only a small subset of the language used in a particular set of ways works. You have to resist the urge to get too clever (in some ways, but in other ways you can get extremely clever with it).

I thought that if you have some idea about how hardware works, it is kind of more or less obvious whether something is synthesizable or not.

The Altera Max 10 devices are also relatively simple to support (flash on the chip, few power rails, etc.)

People don't realize how much electric heating costs in comparison to the fossil fuel alternatives. Gas so much cheaper per joule it more than makes up for the efficiency losses. This is true even without California's insane electricity economy.

The US average residential electricity price is 18.07 c/kWh [0]. Natural gas is $15.39/thousand cubic ft [1]. 1k cubic feet of gas is about 300kWh (this varies because natural gas is not always the same and because the higher heating value and lower heating value are different. So the US average is about 5c/kWh of natural gas.

In decent weather, one should not use resistive electric heat — one should use a heat pump. In decent weather, a COP of 4 is about par for the course, making electric heat a bit cheaper. So I don’t believe your assertion that “gas is so much cheaper per joule”.

Obviously this varies by what you do with your heat and the conditions. Gas stoves are wildly inefficient, but induction can exceed a COP of 100%. In very very cold weather, heat pump COP drops, so gas will win. Gas tankless water heaters are reasonably priced and can reach well over 90% efficiency, whereas heat pump water heaters need a tank, which is somewhat lossy.

But gas has a major downside (aside from CO2 and other emissions): you need to pipe the stuff to the endpoint, and a lot of communities, especially new developments, have decided that this is not worth the expense or danger.

[0] September 2025: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

[1] https://www.eia.gov/naturalgas/monthly/pdf/table_20.pdf


I'm not sure what physics you're using to get a COP > 1 for an induction stove. I'm pretty sure you could put a Stirling engine on that stove and have a perpetual motion machine. Most of them run about 80-90% compared to 30-40% for gas equivalents, about 2-2.5x more efficient. And this is with expensive, high-end cooktops.

I think heat pumps make sense to use when available, but that's kind of separate from electric heat sources. If you actually have to source your heat from the power source itself, it's cheaper to get it cookies.

I have a heat pump on my house, but there's also a high-efficiency furnace and its COP is over 90% combusting gas.


Whoops, that was a typo. Gas stoves really are kind of absurdly inefficient, though. You can buy silly pots with heat exchangers on the bottom that do better, though.

These things are also probably really loud if you happen to have a sensitive set of sonar buoys. I'm not entirely sure how you solve that one, because putting them in deeper water would also make them less effective.

This seems like maybe the least BS answer. Sub detection.

Should be easy enough to use some form of active noise cancelling for that.

The algorithm in question is a hypothetical algorithm for a hypothetical computer with certain properties. The properties in question are assumed to be cheap.

In the case of quantum algorithms in BQP, though, one of those properties is SNR of analog calculations (which is assumed to be infinite). SNR, as a general principle, is known to scale really poorly.


> In the case of quantum algorithms in BQP, though, one of those properties is SNR of analog calculations (which is assumed to be infinite). SNR, as a general principle, is known to scale really poorly.

As far as i understand, that isn't an assumption.

The assumption is that the SNR of logical (error-corrected) qubits is near infinite, and that such logical qubits can be constructed from noisey physical qubits.


There are several properties that separate real quantum computers from the "BQP machine," including decoherence and SNR. Error-correction of qubits is mainly aimed at decoherence, but I'm not sure it really improves SNR of gates on logical qubits. SNR dictates how precisely you can manipulate the signal (these are a sort of weird kind of analog computer), and the QFTs involved in Shor's algorithm need some very precise rotations of qubits. Noise in the operation creates an error in that rotation angle. If your rotation is bad to begin with, I'm not sure the error correction actually helps.

> The assumption is that the SNR of logical (error-corrected) qubits is near infinite, and that such logical qubits can be constructed from noisey physical qubits.

This is an argument I've heard before and I don't really understand it[1]. I get that you can make a logical qubit out of physical qubits and build in error correction so the logical qubit has perfect SNR, but surely if (say the number of physical qubits you need to get the nth logical qubit is O(n^2) for example, then the SNR (of the whole system) isn't near infinite it's really bad.

[1] Which may well be because I don't understand quantum mechanics ...


The really important thing is that logical qbit error decreases exponentially with error correction amount. As such, for the ~1000 qbit regime needed for factoring, the amount of error correction ends up being essentially a constant factor (~1000x physical to logical). As long as you can build enough "decent" quality physical qbits and connect them, you can get near perfect logical qbits.

Having demonstrated error correction, some incremental improvements can now be made to make it more repeatable and with better characteristics.

The hard problem then remains how to connect those qubits at scale. Using a coaxial cable for each qubit is impractical; some form of multiplexing is needed. This, in turn, causes qubits to decohere while waiting for their control signal.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: