I was part of the small team that added Exchange Offline mode very, very late in the product cycle specifically to counter the Notes Local Replication story.
We were asked for something quick and easy, but decided to put the effort in to make it the correct way for the Exchange architecture.
The bulk of that code is still there 30 years later.
I’m a big fan of her current podcast - The Rest Is Science. Informative and entertaining as well as being easy to listen to (I’m not a fan of many audio-only shows, so listenability is a big factor for me)
I really like her, but man I find Michael unbearable.
It also just feels too fake to me. I know they already knew the info they just had a strong reaction to, but they're reacting strongly on purpose for the sake of being engaging. I didn't find it annoying to start with, but it got more grating as I tried more episodes.
I recall in one episode she says "That's amazing" or something to that effect, to a fact regarding fluid dynamics. She has a PhD in fluid dynamics. She already knew whatever that fact was.
But I mean, fluid dynamics is amazing. It still gives me frisson when certain ideas are reminded to me. I think she's completely honest with reactions, she loves science. Many of us share her enthusiasm and I love seeing hers.
The lanes are quite narrow, and the outer curb is deceptive - there’s a 1” edge with a curved curb behind it making it look wider than it actually is. Scraping along that edge will push cars into the center of the road. There will be a lot of minor accidents here due to the road design.
One other second order effect - people are getting used to roundabouts here now, but nearby are ‘traffic circles’ that are roundabouts with stop signs on some entrances. People are now ignoring those stop signs (because it’s a roundabout!). I almost hit 3 cars in 2 intersections as people ignored their stop sign.
It's more complex than that. I live in Seattle near a street that has these traffic circles. The design is:
* There is a round obstruction in the middle of the intersection like a roundabout.
* The street going north-south through the intersection does not have a stop sign.
* The street going east-west has stop signs on both sides.
* But the north-south street which doesn't have to stop also has speed humps on it to slow drivers down.
On its face, this seems like a totally bananas design. The street that should be efficient by not having to stop has traffic calming speed humps on it anyway, negating the efficiency. The cross streets get none of the efficiency of a roundabout because they have to stop anyway. And the combination of roundabout and stop signs is very confusing to drivers.
It makes no sense... if you assume the intersection is designed entirely for cars.
But it isn't, it's a "neighborhood greenway"[1]. The north-south street is designed to improve bicycle traffic. The speed humps don't slow cyclists down. The roundabout middle and stop signs on the cross streets make it safer for cyclists to cruise through the intersection without stopping.
If you ever bike commute, you quickly learn how lethal a lot of stopping and going is for cycling. The effort and efficiency really only make sense if you can go a fairly steady speed for much of your commute. Accelerating a bike is a lot of work.
Once you factor in bikes, the design of these intersections makes more sense. At least in theory. In practice, though people are consistently confused by "roundabout + stop signs" and I see drivers blow through those stop signs more than I've ever seen any other traffic violation by a large margin. Because of that, cyclists and drivers going north-south still have to be paranoid going into the intersection. Even though they have the right of way, there's about a 25% chance the other driver won't stop anyway.
It was a good idea, and maybe the execution will work out once people get more educated. But right now it's a mess. I walk along that street often and I spend a lot of time gesticulating wildly at drivers when they blow through those stop signs.
I live by a bunch of these, but worse IMO is the "four way intersection with no signs or circle or anything" where you just kind of hope no one comes fast and hits you (I imagine on a bike where you wouldn't stop if there was a sign this is even more dangerous). Seattle is weird. Traffic circle with stop signs is fine by me, they don't really function well as roundabouts for most cars, anyways, some of them are too cramped to actually go all the way around smoothly.
> worse IMO is the "four way intersection with no signs or circle or anything" where you just kind of hope no one comes fast and hits you
Agreed, totally. That's what this street used to be before they converted it. I hated driving it because I had to crawl through each intersection because you never knew if someone was going to just blow through it or not. It was even slower than a four-way stop.
Hah! Yeah I also live on a neighborhood greenway street with a traffic circle in Seattle and the odd stop sign layout. It confused me for a year until I learned about the greenway program.
Seattle has plenty of traffic circles just laying around that predate the greenway program though.
I almost never see Seattle drivers blow through stop signs though, maybe people in my neighborhood are just more chill? :D
Mine was converted to a greenway pretty recently, so it may be that drivers just have old habits from before when those intersections didn't have any stop signs.
Good to hear they are adding more green ways! I love the program and I feel they are safer (and a lot more affordable) than "bike lanes" on arterial streets that are often just a painted line.
Seems reasonable. Of course there are really good (true) roundabout designs that are great of cycling (and walking), but without understanding the space it's hard to know if they would fit / work well.
What they're talking about is basically a small concrete circle (sometimes it's not a circle, but a round-ish shape vaguely near the center) plopped down in a standard residential intersection (sometimes with a lot of stuff in it that blocks the view in case you were worried about knowing if someone is crossing the street on the other side). Better designs likely wouldn't fit without raising the cost a huge amount.
If you were building Rails apps in 2005/6, more than likely you were reading Ezra's blog post on how deploy to your VPS. It was tricky to get right, but Ezra made it so that it was no longer impossible. He was always there to help people with their own tricky configurations too.
If it does work this way, this is a breach of the Facebook developer terms of service. Data may be cached for specific amounts of time, but long term storage is not allowed. When this app gets big enough to notice, Facebook will shut it down
> You may cache data you receive through use of the Facebook API in order to improve your application’s user experience, but you should try to keep the data up to date. This permission does not give you any rights to such data.
Yes, I'm aware of this. But the applications they went after adjusted Facebook (injected into the DOM), instead of leveraged their API to provide functionality through a Facebook canvas app, or externally.
The $12000 out of pocket is only if you use it because you need medical help. You don't actually spend the whole $22K unless you have a lot of medical issues, and then you'll be happy that you only pay $22K per year!
When I left my last employer, I had the same company plan under COBRA. It started at ~$1000, and then went to ~$1300 at the next new year. It had lower out of pocket expenses, but those came at the cost of more monthly payment.
My current Gold medical plan (2 years later) is $820, plus dental at $120 or so. ~$950 for Gold plan, vs $1300 for my COBRA plan (in between, I had a really crappy personal plan that covered almost nothing for ~$600)
People who have employer payed medical have no idea how expensive their plans actually are
People who have employer payed medical have no idea how expensive their plans actually are
People in general have no idea how much their employers pay for any of the mandates - this is by design. If people were forced to pay all (the exact same) expenses from their own paychecks then the idea that they were getting a good deal would fade away.
In addition to what others have mentioned, your old plan had a lifetime maximum payout - maybe $1M, maybe $2M. That is removed by the ACA, and that costs extra too.
Also, there is extra cost because insurers now need to cover existing conditions - allowing you to change providers if you are already sick.
All of these extra things make it more expensive for some, but a better overall coverage - if you have catastrophic illness, you may have not been covered at the top end for all of these costs on your old plan.
Younger people tend not to think about catastrophic issues like 3+ years of cancer treatment, because new treatments are a) expensive and b) may extend your life significantly, so you may actually hit your $2M lifetime maximum, and then you are on your own, until you're bankrupt, and then the state (i.e. taxpayers) would help you out.
So, taken over 50+ years (not just this year's numbers) these new plans actually provide much better coverage, and may even take pressure off the Taxpayers for those that are under covered for their medical issues.
On a positive note on how to move forward on this idea, there's an example in the Seattle startup scene that is tackling a similar government regulation issue by focusing on exactly one set of regulations at a time.
Remitly https://www.remitly.com/ provides a service to send cash overseas to the families of immigrants who now work in the US
Sending cash has a lot of regulatory hurdles, so they picked 1 US state (WA) and one overseas country (the Philippines) to start their business, and then expanding their reach, first to other US states, and eventually to other countries. Focusing on exactly one set of regulations at each end vastly simplifies the legal issues (and costs)
We were asked for something quick and easy, but decided to put the effort in to make it the correct way for the Exchange architecture.
The bulk of that code is still there 30 years later.
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