In cases similar to desktops with electron vs. native (although with different requirements) where either you need access to significant native features that are not supported in the browser, or if your app is process intensive, i.e. graphics heavy games.
The analogy to Electron makes me wonder if a possible mass migration to PWAs will make the experience on already-slow low-end phones even more atrocious.
it would be the opposite actually, since you don't have to wrap the app in a heavy bundle. avg iOS app size is like 30mb. a web app shouldn't even come close.
This has been a huge differentiator in countries where users are sensitive to data consumption, which is why you see many case studies about countries in India, Africa, etc. getting great traction with PWAs.
Storage space isn't generally the bottleneck on older devices- it's the CPU/RAM. On that count, native apps are usually overwhelmingly preferable.
If these catch on a big way, it'll be catastrophic for more underpowered devices. Modern web pages are already starting to get acutely uncomfortable to use on older iPhones, let alone older Android devices- we aren't yet at the point where performance levels are high enough that we can slap the equivalent of an electron wrapper on everything, smirk at users' devices' vanishing battery life and call it a day.
Apples to oranges. The download size of a native app, while important to keep low, will have minimal effect of the actual user experience post-download. Web applications will in almost all cases be a strictly worse user experience.
The statistics shown on how helmet laws actually lead to an increase in cycling accidents is very interesting. I wonder what the correlation is on this? Is it because cyclists not wearing helmets generally bike in a safer manner? Or maybe if there are no helmet laws, then streets designed for bikes are designed with more safety in mind?
An interesting note about bike shares usage. I have seen some very effective bike sharing programs but also some very ineffective ones. In San Jose, there is a bike share program, but the bikes themselves cost $9 to ride, while in London the bike share cost 2p (~3-4$). The price point made all the difference to me.
Potential reasons for the surprising helmet-accident correlation:
(edit: inserted 0'th reason)
0) It could be true but irrelevant: We mainly want to reduce severe injuries, accident rate only peripherally interesting in relation to this.
1) Is the direction of causality estabilished? Is it possible that a trend of increasing accident rates results in lawmakers passing helmet laws?
2) But generally it stands to reason that cycling helmets can't actually reduce accidents, just reduce their impact. And it also sounds reasonable that helmets would give bikers a small amount of additional risk appetite.
3) Maybe helmet laws encourage casual or impaired cyclists (uncoordinated people, children, people with bad awareness, etc) to get on bikes, and/or repel the confident types who choose to do other exercise rather than wear sweaty and dorky looking helmets. So the bicycling acuity of the bicycler population is reduced.
4) Is there data picking at play? This cites only 2 studies reporting increased accident rates, and both of them were in USA, so the data is not very good for drawing general conclusions. Is there something in the local circumstances or bicyclist demography? How many studies can you find where this increased accident rate doesn't show?
I think it would be interesting if conducted with multiple riders, and different areas. Combine this with the fact there are studies showing increase car and bicycle crashes with helmet wearers. It definitely plausible.
There is also an other study I remember seeing that noticed helmet wearers took more risks. So there could be more variables at play.
This could be too. It should be in the data: countries where cyclists mainly share/don't share roads with cars. In my part of the world, nearly all car-bike collisions are at intersections.
>3) Maybe helmet laws encourage casual or impaired cyclists (uncoordinated people, children, people with bad awareness, etc) to get on bikes, and/or repel the confident types who choose to do other exercise rather than wear sweaty and dorky looking helmets. So the bicycling acuity of the bicycler population is reduced.
I was expecting the exact opposite. It's the casual or new cyclists who stop cycling because of a helmet law, this is the most common finding of all the investigations into a possible helmet law I've seen. It then leads into 3.5) the type of people who cycle when a helmet is required take more risks/spend more time among cars and have less fellow cyclists keeping the drivers aware/honest/giving.
I generally wear a helmet as it is required by law where I live (Australia). The odd occasion that I forget to wear my helmet, I've found myself riding more carefully. I'm a very careful rider even with a helmet, but clearly, I ride more carefully when I don't wear a helmet.
I've cycled both Australia and UK and I would say I cycle the same with and without helmet. In Australia I would be really nervous cycling without because there is such a strong culture to wearing and the enforcement of the law. In the UK (where it's not illegal) the first few times I cycled without a helmet I thought I was being dangerous and cycled differently but then I got used to the sensation and cycled the same way I always do.
I think the telling quote of the article is the last sentance which sums up his feelings on the current US situation
- "The situation that many in-demand U.S. cities find themselves in is an example of extreme “market failure,” which is what bureaucrats call regulatory failure; and is also extremely unnatural"
Basically he is saying that "bureaucrats" ineffectively regulated the market to the point of failure, or where the market could no longer compensate for the demand which causes a lack of affordable housing.
So I think he isn't calling for more / less regulation, but better slash more effective regulation that allows the market to operate.
I think it's more complicated than the author suspects.
This is not a US only issue. And it's not a developing nations-like issue (say rural to urban migration pattern).
We're seeing this in developed countries (with a few exceptions, Japan, but they also have the confounding declining pop factor). So, The UK, Germany, Sweden, China, many others are seeing similar issues to the US (SF is a special case exacerbated by politics, but I digress).
I think policymakers (and markets) have been caught off guard by this shift to the city, ironically, oftentimes, precipitated by a boom in technology and or technology rich companies, who, despite Marissa's observation, can afford and can work with a remote workforce.
This is a transformation that was not predicted. And, unless in s top-down government system (ala China, or Singapore) this kind of change in infrastructural usage change, takes multiple decades to adjust to.
You could make the case (not made in the article) that social policy is increasingly being shaped to favour _ownership_ over _contribution_. Interest rates are kept low, residential investment property is taxed favourably, agricultural land is heavily subsidised, planning/zoning is unreasonably tough, and so on.
The market doesn't can't correct because the working classes are losing their ability to afford property whilst ever-richer property owners are heavily incentivised to continually expand their portfolios.
I suppose, but also we have a lot more international wealth buying up real estate which often times goes under used.
With globalized, unrestricted open markets we get the new international wealthy buying real estate across borders which competes against local buyers.
So, in SF and Vancouver you're not only competing against transplants from the Midwest but with wealthy investors from China, India, and other countries where people for different reasons want to get their money out of their countries.
It's perfectly natural side effect of deliberately imposing extremely low costs on owning land. If something is valuable and untaxed (c.f. repeal of prop 13) then hoarding is inevitable, which will drive down supply.
Property developers don't want that of course, but they do want fewer regulations.
His proposal is two-fold, for those who want a summary.
1) Build better transit to connect areas that are affordable (or areas at all i.e. San Jose / Oakland) to central business districts
2) To accomplish this by creating a centralized governing authority for the whole Bay Area.
I wonder if this kind of consolidation has ever happened before. Did New York City absorb areas that it now controls as it evolved, or did the parties agree afterward to some symbiotic relationship?
I'd argue Oakland is fairly well connected to the SF CBD. A lot of people in Oakland live within (at most) a 15-20 minute walk of a BART station, and then it's ~20 minutes to downtown SF, with only a handful of stops.
What surprises me is that there aren't more startups headquartered in Oakland. Sure, it's a bit more hassle for people in SF to get out there, but you're going against the flow of traffic, so the commute is pleasant. And my suspicion is there are a lot of senior people living in the East Bay (or even further out). People who've moved on from small apartments and roommates and and have their own places, or have a family, or want cheaper rent... whatever it is. I suspect there's enough of those people who'd love to be getting on and off at 19th St Oakland and working down near Lake Merritt, rather than commuting into the city. I have a senior engineer friend, living in Berkeley, who said he'd take a $20k pay cut not to have to commute into SF. And that's not even a bad commute.
If I was starting up, looking to save some money, and wanting to hire experienced developers, I would definitely be setting up in Oakland.
Tell me about it... I'm sick and tired of the trope that Boulder is just white people from the coasts when it's actually wealthy people from the coasts, and Wisconsin.
You know what's funny? Six or seven hours south is Santa Fe/Albuquerque NM. Both have nearby national laboratories, colleges, and (some) technical businesses. They're also generally affordable. Pretty much anywhere in NM would just kill for more business and has some technical workforce. I'm also sure it'd be relatively easy to convince people to move there.
Two years ago I moved from Albuquerque to Denver, explicitly for work related reasons. The difference in available engineering jobs is night and day.
ABQ is a starkly beautiful midsize city with an unusually high number of nuclear physicists. That's necessary but far from sufficient for being a tech center. And as far as I could tell, the city's ideal is for a relatively small number of relatively large employers, not in hundreds of 5-20 employee firms.
Besides, if you're interested in working for one of those firms, let alone starting one, Denver's only six or seven hours north.
That's why I think Abq could be a budding tech hub with relatively few changes. There are some phds in the neighborhood and at least one good, affordable engineering college (Socorro/NMT). I'm guessing it's governmental policies (or lack of tax incentives) and a lack of at least one tech billionaire that likes the place keeping it down.
I mention that last part as I think Zappos being in LV has pulled some tech interest into LV.
Albuquerque does have reasonably good Internet infrastructure and the cost of living is low. But most of the tech employers are government contractors that require a security clearance, which is a turnoff for some. (If you lose your startup job and you don't have a clearance, you're screwed.)
We also have this good news/bad news airport situation: The airport is in the middle of town and it's VERY easy to get in and out of quickly. OTOH there are few direct flights anywhere -- the Bay area being a notable exception.
How is it possible they have few direct flights? It's an international airport. Anyway, that's the sort of thing that would change if it became a tech hub. I imagine that's all supply/demand. The infrastructure is already there.
Supply and demand. There are plenty of direct flights to hub cities (Dallas, Houston, Denver, Chicago, etc) but Albuquerque itself is not a hub city. So a trip to e.g. Boston from Albuquerque is an all-day slog.
As for the "international" aspect of ABQ, that's mostly wishful thinking. There might be a few flights to/from Mexico, but that's about it.
Unaffordable housing is how local homeowners loot the vast sums of money chasing tech talent. If housing is affordable, you can assume that the high-paying jobs aren't there. If you start to prop up the job market there, it'll quickly become unaffordable once folks realize that its a tech hub.
I have a brother that lived in Los Alomos, the National Labs are no where even close to Santa Fe or Albuquerque and the Universities there are not comparable to CU. When the Lobos join the Pac-12, that's a good way to know that they are comparable. Housing in Santa Fe is not exactly cheap either. Also, NM is an acquired taste and is not for everyone. The labs were kinda put there because of the remoteness of the place. I mean, Los Alomos is at about 7500 feet, 2 beers and you are knackered. That said, I do love NM and it's wilderness; I'll take my enchilada Christmas style ;)
> I mean, Los Alomos is at about 7500 feet, 2 beers and you are knackered.
Oh FFS. When you're visiting, sure. But not after you've lived here a few weeks and your body has built more red blood cells. That's why cyclists come here to train -- it's legal blood doping.
Sports teams seem to correlate pretty well with donor funding, grant funding, and general population. It's not a hard and fast rule, but it's not a bad metric
Seconded. But the big problem with NM is there's no first-world healthcare here, which makes it a tough place to live if you're older. Okay that's an exaggeration. There is good healthcare but not nearly enough for the population since doctors and nurses can make a lot more $$ elsewhere. So getting a PCP is very hard, ordinary appointments take weeks, and specialist appointments take months.
We ended up in Bend, Oregon rather than Boulder and are happy. Prices are lower (for now) and traffic is nonexistant IMO. But there's something wrong with the development patterns in much of the US that means those things will get worse over time unless we do things differently.
This is a fairly technical analysis, and the terminology used in many cases is above what I know about networking. But the one quote that will stick is this.
"There is no such a thing as a temporary change or workaround: In most cases, workarounds are tech debt."
Tech debt is a choice. Sometimes you'll want to embrace some level of technical debt in order to bring something into production quickly, with the understanding that you will fix later. It's part of a triad with Speed and Quality.
That may not be the choice Twitter has made in this instance, but it's a viable choice nonetheless. Defaulting to tech debt = evil wrong imo.
The problem with technical debt versus financial debt is that the latter has a monthly mandatory cost ( interest payments ) that can't be ignored and which is visible all the way up to the C-level, whereas middle-management can keep obscuring the presence of technical debt and pushing its repayment out to the right.
Essentially it's a 'free' internal debt, regardless of how often architects and developers complain of its cost.
Thus in a contest between doing something right, but expensively, versus good-enough-for-now but technically-constrained the latter will usually win.
And sometime a workaround is the best solution you'll get. Because solving the problem properly might introduce new issues, which might require new workarounds.
Sometimes it seems like "technical debt" is used as a dysphemism for "refactorable." We see railing against technical debt, then tomorrow there's a "code is never finished" post that gets nods all around. A bit of a strawman, but my point is that there's a big picture of the technology lifecycle that somehow fosters disparate contexts for the same exact thing.
Truth. The only time I consider something temporary is when the business stakeholder asking for the temporary change has a) promised b) a specific period c) when the cleanup happens, and d) they have a track record of honoring their promises.
And I encourage everybody to make that their standard. Now I never cut a corner without that. I never even offer. My default is a zero-additional-tech-debt approach, because that's the only thing I think is responsible or sustainable. If there's a legitimate business need for taking on a bit of tech debt, I will propose the deal of splitting the work into, say, "experiment" and "cleanup", but cleanup ends up in the workstream with a date attached. If the stakeholder accepts the deal but fails to honor it, I revoke their tech-debt credit card.
No, it makes much more sense than that, since there are changes that are not incurring technical debt. It's only "temporary changes" and "workarounds" in other words quick kludges that the say are incurring permanent technical debt.
This headline is a bit misleading. It says that Tests of the EMDrive were successful in the laboratory setting and that they are currently testing it onboard the Tiangong 2.
It does not reference results of the Tiangong 2 tests.
But a 1:55 at Thunderhill would be consider a fairly decent amateur time on a 600cc bike so they are definitely making progress.