This reminds me of the time we wanted to ride the Amtrak Coast Starlight from Seattle to San Jose on our trip to the US in 2014. It's supposed to be a scenic route, and takes about 24 hours for that leg. (The train carries on to LA IIRC.)
When we got to the station in Seattle and checked in our bags they told us the train was at least 5 hours delayed, so we should go do something else for 3 hours and then come back for a status update. We also left our mobile number and email address with them in case there was anything else. (Though in theory they should already have had these from the ticket booking.)
Anyway, we went off to a café round the corner (it was an apparently rare snowy day in Seattle - hence the delay, plus we didn't want to stray too far) and had some drinks and brunch.
After about 2 and a half hours later we wanted to stretch our legs and wandered back to the station. Whereupon we were told the train had already left without us… but with our bags, but we could have a refund or take the train on a later day. ️
We only had overnight bags, and an onward journey planned the other end, plus we were now super annoyed so we ended up scrambling to find a flight that would get us there by the next day. That was the closest to the flight time I've ever bought an airline ticket, less than 3 hours I think. It worked out OK in the end, we got our bags from San Jose station the next morning as we'd beaten the train there, though the contents of one of the bags was damaged from rough handling.
Having close connections to both countries, I can say that kids in Austria are definitely freer than in the UK.
For one, in Austria, kids have a legal right to go to school on their own, be it on foot or by public transport. A lot of parents do drive their kids to school, unfortunately even where it's really not necessary, but you do also see plenty of young kids walking there or home, or taking the bus or train. You definitely also see more kids "hanging out" in Austria - in the UK, everyone seems quick to jump to conclusions about gangs, so I guess "respectable" parents won't let their kids do that.
On the other hand, I felt I probably had even more freedom growing up in the 90s (in Austria) than many of today's kids. This is probably more of an individual choice of the parents (for some reason, people are afraid, despite this being one of the safest countries in the world) than direct societal pressure (being reported to the cops or social services, etc.) as it seems to be in the UK or US.
Perhaps you'd like to explain how people driving through the country, or anyone else in fact, drives down ADSL speeds to single-digit or low tens of Mbit/s. Or indeed how population fluctuations of about 1-2% might cause cellular networks to develop dark patches or to regress from LTE to 3G or EDGE.
Though I attribute this to random fluctuations in the news and meta-news cycle, rather than to some failing of the HN community (which I think is awesome).
I don't know. Do you monitor the 'new' page at all? The SNR there is certainly worse, but I do come across submissions I enjoy far more than practically anything on the front page these days. I realise that submission quality is subjective; I guess the community's average opinion on this has diverged far enough from mine that the front page isn't doing it for me anymore. Due to the low SNR (and rate of change) on the 'new' page, consuming HN via it is even more time consuming than normal.
I do catch myself idly looking through front page discussions and even commenting, but there is zero intellectual value in it most of the time. At least I don't upvote the stories.
/classic is slightly better on the surface. (currently 6 upvoted stories by me vs 3 on the frontpage) Unfortunately, submissions seem to hang around there for longer than on the frontpage, so it's like a distilled version of the front page's top 60 into 30, not a truly different set.
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The tick is greyed out, so I guess it's not yet active. But I have no way of telling when it will become active, and no way of disabling it preemptively. Another reason to only log onto facebook in incognito/privacy mode.
When we got to the station in Seattle and checked in our bags they told us the train was at least 5 hours delayed, so we should go do something else for 3 hours and then come back for a status update. We also left our mobile number and email address with them in case there was anything else. (Though in theory they should already have had these from the ticket booking.)
Anyway, we went off to a café round the corner (it was an apparently rare snowy day in Seattle - hence the delay, plus we didn't want to stray too far) and had some drinks and brunch.
After about 2 and a half hours later we wanted to stretch our legs and wandered back to the station. Whereupon we were told the train had already left without us… but with our bags, but we could have a refund or take the train on a later day. ️
We only had overnight bags, and an onward journey planned the other end, plus we were now super annoyed so we ended up scrambling to find a flight that would get us there by the next day. That was the closest to the flight time I've ever bought an airline ticket, less than 3 hours I think. It worked out OK in the end, we got our bags from San Jose station the next morning as we'd beaten the train there, though the contents of one of the bags was damaged from rough handling.