They reduce car crashes with other cars. I don't know off the top of my head if they reduce car-pedestrian crashes but I suspect not.
I used to live off of a busy roundabout in a place that makes heavy heavy use of roundabouts (almost no four-way stops). It felt dangerous as fuck honestly. The crosswalks are a little "downstream" of the true circle, where cars have already begun to exit. Frequently (saw this a few times myself) a car would stop for a pedestrian and then get rear-ended by another car focused on exiting the roundabout.
This was not the US so unfamiliarity with roundabouts can't be blamed. They were the norm there.
Every time I see a crosswalk near a roundabout, I think that's a terrible place for a crosswalk (the drivers are distracted by figuring out if they need to stop, and when it's clear to keep going).
How small can you make a roundabout? Where I live stop signs are common at very small intersections.
Alternating two way stops (n/s at intersection one, e/w at intersection two) seems like maybe an ok way to reduce the problem by half at little to no cost?
There's a configuration for bike safety that's basically a mini roundabout superimposed on a normal intersection. It doesn't significantly increase the size of the intersection, but the geometry works out in a way where bikes can go at near full speed, but it's impossible for a right turning car and straight going bike to get into a collision without seeing each other first (assuming both are looking forward while driving).
Mini roundabouts are very likely to be confusing horrors, outside of low-speed residential zones, parking lots and the like.
See the city of Nantes in France (roundabout’s paradise), navigating the intersections is horrible. In a few parts of town they even have double mini roundabouts. The only reasonable explanation I found is “security by confusion” : if you have no idea how to drive through the intersection, you’re more likely to slow down. Well it doesn’t make the intersection really safer.
I've seen some in Vancouver that are little more than an oversize planter with a scrub in it stuck in the middle of the intersection. As long as it deflects traffic to the side a bit, a slowdown is achieved and the main purpose fulfilled.
Basically they recommend 28m diameter if you are going to have a central island, otherwise it should be a mini-roundabout (capable of being driven over)
I’ll add that in my family’s home town (farming town in Perthshire) in Scotland, there are mini roundabouts that are just a spot of white paint in the middle of the intersection. It works fine.
Roundabouts generally require a driver to look in a direction other than their direction of travel, to determine if it is safe to go. They are also designed to reduce the amount of time any given vehicle has to actually stop if there is no reason to. However, to keep the flow, a driver must check if there is incoming traffic. This varies based on left/right side driving countries. Lights for pedestrians might help, but then the benefit of continual traffic flow is reduced. There are more considerations that can make it work, but I often see this point (my first sentence) overlooked.
> Roundabouts generally require a driver to look in a direction other than their direction of travel, to determine if it is safe to go.
True for stop signs... and any other traffic control solution in existence, frankly. Yielded merges are the most obvious form of specifically unbroken traffic flow that requires the same.
> They are also designed to reduce the amount of time any given vehicle has to actually stop if there is no reason to.
So it works like a yield. That's a good thing because it reduces congestion.
> This varies based on left/right side driving countries.
There are much bigger issues resulting from switching between left- and right-side driving standards which don't have anything to do with roundabouts, so this doesn't say anything about roundabouts so much as the difference in standards.
> Lights for pedestrians might help, but then the benefit of continual traffic flow is reduced.
Comes with the territory, and is also true of every other traffic control solution in existence. The complete solution to this is to completely separate pedestrian and vehicular traffic, which is also not limited to roundabouts.
It sounds like you don't have a problem with roundabouts so much as traffic control per se, if you believe these to be reasons not to implement roundabouts.
>> Roundabouts generally require a driver to look in a direction other than their direction of travel, to determine if it is safe to go.
> True for stop signs...
Not really. Stop signs make you stop first, before needing to look around, after which you continue. There's no "direction of travel" when you've stopped; you're not traveling when you've stopped. Meaning you can focus on one thing at a time, unlike with a roundabout.
Huh? The point is that your attention (and vision) isn't nearly as divided when driving with a stop sign than with a roundabout. You don't have to multitask nearly as much; you do one thing at a time. Less division of attention = less car accidents.
It doesn't sound like you're familiar with any of the studies concerning the safety of traffic flow if you think that that is the only factor that determines intersection safety.
> It doesn't sound like you're familiar with any of the studies concerning the safety of traffic flow if you think that that is the only factor that determines intersection safety.
I'm pretty sure "the only factor that determines intersection safety is division of attention" was not a stance I was taking (when is an event ever a function of just 1 variable in the real world?), but if you'd prefer to take a swipe at me regardless, it would be nice if you could make your response constructive and actually link to some studies that show I said something contrary to reality, if you're well-studied in traffic flow.
Hopefully my reply clarified for you what my earlier point was, even if you think the point was wrong.
The implied point of the above comment was that, while specific linear relationships can be hypothesized, and shown in certain limited controlled experiments, the nonlinear interactions with every single other factor makes such an assertion not only meaningless but also misleading.
"Well-studied", no, I would not claim that. I follow the zeitgeist of urban planners as they discuss topics like this on the fora in which they congregate. I read some of the studies they post and discuss, and I have picked up on some of the memes present in that community. Something that comes up again and again and again and again (and which is immediately apparent upon reading the research) is the primacy of roundabouts for intersections, because they are the safest of the popular options and less prone to congestion than stop signs, stop lights, etc. Even when they do get congested, the outcomes are better for everyone on average, since everyone waits a similar amount of time compared to the asymmetry of e.g. intersections with stoplights. One common pitfall in thinking about these things is only thinking about individual wait times in a subjective sense, and not aggregate wait times in a systemic sense. The latter perspective provides much clarity.
Here, I did your Googling for you. Where do I send the invoice?
Plenty of people find it tasty. Is it $20 burger tasty? No. Is it more tasty than some $20 burgers? Yes. Does it taste like garbage to some people? Yes. Does it taste great to others? Yes.
Theoretically ES can scale that big, but isn't easy and takes a large team to manage. Just like at Google.
ES is a toolbox not something you can just use off the shelf. I think Elastic likes to make people think it is a off the shelf solution, but the defaults aren't great for many use cases. However ES can include pagerank, ML, BM25, etc in the ranking calculation but it requires search relevance expertise to make it all work together for any particular use case. And different use cases will need different ranking equations.
Yes of course. What I meant is - when I query a phrase, that phrase can be found in one million webpages, yet I get a bunch of them sorted by relevance. Surely that is a combination of two things - deep rooted crawling that gathers data from most websites, and secondly, a nice algorithm to sort them by relevance that is based on a variety of signals. ES has nothing to do with crawling, that is custom to the user using ES, but for the content fed to ES, how much does it allow customizing signals, combining them into a custom relevance logic, and how much does it allow to modify and edit the indexing logic so that say I can use a combination of BM25 and PageRank?
Fiber being a type of carb is also found in other high carb foods like beans, whole grains, potatoes (with skin), and popcorn. Beans are the best source of fiber by a mile in terms of quantity.
I don't think I said anything of the sort. Regardless, fiber is food for the microbes in the gut. Eating fiber from a diversity of sources is important as well as quantity.
Black beans, kidney beans, white beans, garbanzo beans, lima beans, black eyed beans.... we can go on if you like. Don't forget the huge variety of lentils as well.
Eat fiber. Meet the recommended amount and eat a diverse set of fiber which will feed different microbes in the gut. It will take some time for the gut to adjust to the new levels though. Expect gas, cramping, etc for a few days.
Do you advise just fiber from natural foods, or do you take a fiber supplement (like those that come in powder form)? I guess the supplement route won't give me the diverse fiber types you mention, am I right?
The internet and world wide web were both useful immediately since they were both a solution to a problem. Blockchain seems like a solution searching for a problem.
Posting on Reddit or HN is fine, but unlikely to be successful if that is all you do. Cold calling/emailing/linkedin and posting on forums like HN continuously can both help. The latter only works if your solution genuinely solves someone's problem otherwise it will come off spammy. If your solution has obvious keywords and those keywords aren't too expensive, then Google ads can be relatively cheap method to get started too.
Great job! How are the ads implemented and do they cover the costs? I'm thinking of building a similar search engine for a completely different domain. I am a bit concerned about paying for it though.
Ads are added automatically by Google. The whole thing is little more than a wrapper around the 'Programmable Search Element Control API' which is an HTML element you can just insert into any site, like an iframe. Unfortunately this is the only way to make Programmable Search available at scale as the API is restricted to either 10 sites or 10K queries / day, even when paid!
There is a paid version for the HTML plugin, but that would leak the API key and so it wouldn't work as a business.
There is an option to get a share of the revenue generated by a search engine. Maybe it's time for me to figure out how that works.
I was thinking of making a hosted, ad free, customizable version where people upload their own keys. Not sure if people would like that.
As a side-note, it's super easy to remove ads with 1 line of CSS, but I wasn't sure how Google would feel about that so it's not in the online version. TamperMonkey is an extension that allows people to insert their own CSS on different websites. Hmm.
It would be cool if I could take my existing browser history, aggregate by domain, sort by frequency & then create the necessary xml for the programmable search. Maybe with a pick & choose UI so I could decide which sites I wanted.
Right now, looking at your allow-list config, it feels a bit custom to you, but if I had an easy way to limit search to the sites I myself know and trust, I could see how that would be useful.
I know I could probably pick it out of my browser's history UI & poke it into Google's Programmable Search UI, but that seems like a hassle and a half.
That's a good idea! Not OP, but I'm creating a faster search engine for programming queries, depending on the tech searched it will also point to curated sites that could have the answer. Will try to implement your idea as well. Thanks!
Good idea! Would you pay for a premium version where you can customize the whitelist (and additional features) if it were available? Bing charges around $5 per 1000 searches, so I guess it would cost about the same. (Google's API is limited to 10K searches / day, even when paid)
I think just the history->xml conversion would be a bit of a hard sell, but I would be willing to pay for a sub if there were some additional features like:
* easy add to my filter list (like maybe a browser plugin so I can see that the current site isn't in my filter, but I can click a button and now it's in my filter & opposite for remove for when sites start to suck)
* stats on which sites I visit after searching
* aggregate bing+google filtered searches
* curated site lists for different topics, top 100, etc. Maybe like a temporary search using these sets such that I can try them without affecting my own filters. Maybe sharing lists w friends
* some sort of search anonymization/log deletion feature
* integration with browser search on desktop & mobile
* search flags like duckduckgo so I can easily switch filter sets by typing like /news or /nerdshit in the query
Yes! Maybe I'll build a premium customizable version out of it. Do you think that'd be useful? Bing charges around $5 per 1000 searches, so the premium version would be around the same (with caching covering hosting, maybe).
I think I might be willing to pay some amount of money for it, but not very much. I think a lot of other people would be willing to pay decently.
If you want to be cynical, just do Bing/DDG searches over Tor, and scrape that into the cache. This is $0/1000 searches, though it obviously violates some ToS somewhere. Unless they want to block Tor, you should be good.
Maybe a few engineers are making that in SV, but the vast majority are under $200k for salary. With public companies that are doing well in the stock market, total compensation can certainly be $500k. But I think it is an important distinction to make that more than half is from equity and that equity is only lucrative while the company stock is doing well. If the stock market crashes or the company's stock gets in trouble, most of those engineers won't be making $500k.
This. A lot of compensation is tied to equity. Also adjusted for cost of living so naturally CA engineers are paid more over eastern europe.
Dont get me wrong - I would love to hire engineers from eastern europe there are rock stars there but without a local office or presence there it is difficult and there are risks (trust, enforceability of laws) as well as operational overhead with remote in a completely separate TZ
Interesting! Is Blind representative, or would it skew junior? I would imagine the most senior engineers wouldn't be as likely to be on platforms like Blind, but I could be wrong.
My guess is that only 20% (or less) of engineers are senior in any geography. The ~20% of the people polled who earn 200K+ would be senior engineers, I’d think. But even of those, 70% are in the 200-250K range base, which matches my experience.
