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Showing posts from August 29, 2021

Adaptive Scooters Coming to a Street Near You

Adaptive Scooters Coming to a Street Near You By Rachel Vierstra Shared Powered Scooters have grown in popularity over the past few years, giving residents and visitors to San Francisco one more alternative to traveling by car. Scooters can provide increased access to nearby necessities and a fun option for shorter trips. However, standard scooter models are not accessible to many people with disabilities. Motivated by our dedication to providing equitable access to transportation, the SFMTA required all powered scooter permittees to pilot an adaptive scooter program from January 2020 to June 2021. From that pilot, a first of its kind among U.S. transit agencies, we learned important lessons that inform how we can best require scooter operators to expand access for disabled riders moving forward. 2019-2021 Adaptive Scooter Pilot The 2019-2021 scooter permittees, Scoot, Lime, and Spin launched their adaptive scooter pilots with devices that provided additional stability, such as a

Celebrating 148 Years of Cable Cars in San Francisco

Celebrating 148 Years of Cable Cars in San Francisco By Pamela Johnson On September 4, 2021, San Francisco’s historic cable cars will return to revenue service after an unprecedented shut down of more than a year as part of the city's emergency response to protect operators and the public during the Covid19 pandemic. Coincidentally, this reopening marks the 148th year of cable car operations in San Francisco. Rebooting the cable car system required significant work. As the cars had been out of service since March 17, 2020 we had to recertify and hire new line inspectors and prepare the cable cars’ historic infrastructure to accommodate service. Cable car testing began with the Powell-Hyde line in July. In August, the SFMTA announced that free test rides would be offered to the public on all three lines as we worked out possible kinks in the system, leading to this month's return of the landmark cable cars. All aboard? Ding! Ding! A familiar sound is in the air again. It&#

Show HN: NLP Flashcards for Most of the Internet https://ift.tt/3zqcWop

Show HN: NLP Flashcards for Most of the Internet Hello HN! We're Sam and Kanyes. We're building an extension to help you remember what you read online. We're calling it Ferret [1]. When you open Ferret on an HTML page, it generates recall-based questions + answers to reinforce key concepts with NLP. Consider the following toy example where we open Ferret on an explanation of Bayesian statistics. [2] Q: What does the frequentist interpretation view probability as? A: the limit of the relative frequency of an event after many trials Q: What is often computed in Bayesian statistics using mathematical optimization methods? A:The maximum a posteriori We do this by (1) Parsing the DOM tree of an HTML page for tags on the client, and segmenting these into preprocessed chunks (2) Performing inference on question-generation with a T5-base model pretrained on SQuAD (3) Extractive question-answering with the chunk & question we've generated with RoBERTa, also pretrained on SQu

Show HN: A C# library to help you enforce a Given-When-Then structured Unit test https://ift.tt/2Ww7SQM

Show HN: A C# library to help you enforce a Given-When-Then structured Unit test I always strive to write better, clean and readable code. But I often find unit tests are hard to read, and especially harder to quickly identify what are the important pieces, or even what the test is testing about. So I came up with this lightweight library to help enforce unit tests with a Given-When-Then structure. I hope you find this useful. Any feedback are welcome. https://ift.tt/38nP7BN August 30, 2021 at 08:27AM

Show HN: I developed a native macOS client for EC2/S3 console https://ift.tt/3kyARfc

Show HN: I developed a native macOS client for EC2/S3 console Hello HN: Here is the link https://ift.tt/3kuuEAS After forgetting to turn off a p2.xlarge instance for a week, I got so mad at myself I learnt swiftUI to build a native macOS console for most of the actions I do on the web AWS console. I didnt want to use electron or other non native frameworks. Most importantly I just wanted it to know how much a certain instance costs right now, no matter its state, its type, its lifecycle(like ondemand or spot) and the costs associated with the EBS volumes attached including their IOPS/throughput and etc. It also has a S3 object browser, and a drag and drop UI to upload your files so that you can make S3 your own personal dropbox. I dont track or store anything, you just query the aws api. Sorry its a paid app, if anyone wants to try it and cant afford it let me know, I can send it to you. I think this can be useful and cost saving for individuals that spend more than 50usd per month on

Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos https://ift.tt/3Bjv1VN

Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos Hello HN, Over the last year we've been building ente[1], a privacy-friendly, easy-to-use alternative to Google Photos. We've so far built Android[2][3], iOS[4], web[5] apps that encrypt your files and back them up in the background. You can access these across your devices, and share them with other ente users, end-to-end encrypted. You can also use our electron app[6] to maintain a local copy of your backed up files. We've built a fault-tolerant data replication layer that replicates your data to two different storage providers in the EU. We will be providing additional replicas as an addon in the future. We're relying on libsodium[7] for performing all cryptographic operations. Under the hood it uses XChaCha20 and XSalsa20 for encryption and Argon2 for key derivation. We have documented our architecture[8] and open-sourced our clients[9]. We did a soft-launch on r/degoogle[10] sometime ago, and ha