They are slower generally. I know this because most bikes pass me on my daily commute. Maybe 10% of cyclists ride slower, my old bike used to have a speedometer and I averaged 18-22 mph over long distances.
Also keep in mind that the motors are voltage limited at ~15mph. Near that speed, acceleration is basically zero, whereas a bike can accelerate further rather easily.
Acceleration is definitely slower than a bike. Maybe half as much. The scooters are usually 250w but only ~170 makes it to the wheels. Bike riders average 200-300w output and when they first get moving people tend to put in more effort, maybe 400-500 watts. The low speed efficiency of the motors is also terrible, probably less than 100 watts to the ground below 7 mph. I get passed by bikes in straights and between lights every day, and pass only a few bikers a week myself.
Lack of turn signals does suck, I hope they fix this. They should be required. I also agree about visibility and smaller wheels.
I disagree about stability, the center of gravity of the vehicle is much lower, and having your body totally unconstraind with feet inches off the ground makes it far easier to bail. I've flown over the handlebars on a bike more than once because the high CG and large wheels, got severely injured once. Bailing on a scooter is easy and I don't expect anyone in decent shape to get injured because you basically hop off into a brisk run, you can't really do that on a bike.
I've been riding scooters much more than most, close to 5 miles a day, and to me taking one hand off the handlebars is fairly easy. It also feels slower than a bike to me, and sometimes I'll give it a kick start for the first couple seconds. A lot of the reason they feel fast and unstable is because hardly anyone has ridden them much IMO
So many people consider this a menace when in many ways it's closer to utopia. For decades cities have tried to get commuters to switch to bikes and public transportation, but nothing has really stuck in the states due to the convenience of cars. Now that it's happening, some people aren't happy.
The situation is basically that 20% of the population of some cities has switched to an ideal form of transportation within months, and our infrastructure isn't built for it. Imagine the number of bike commuters increased 1000% in three months. That's the situation were in. The irony of people complaining about it isn't lost on me.
People love bikes, and you never really hear complaints about people riding them just about anywhere. Bikers have been "violating" road and sidewalk laws for longer than cars have existed. These scooters are slower and smaller than bikes, and follow regulations better (reflectors, headlights, sometimes brake lights) . They're basically as carbon friendly as you can get for a motorized vehicle. And they're cheap and fairly durable. I bought one ~6 months ago and no problems for 500+ miles, it's practically taken my car off the road permenantly.
We should be embracing these scooter with open arms. They're drastically reducing road congestion at least in my city. Even displacing rideshare to the point that I've had many drivers tell me that nobody gets picked up downtown anymore.
But I guess the "get off my road/sidewalk" backlash is inevitable because people don't like change.
I could, but my laziness prevents me from doing so. The documentation is fairly good for Quasar, hard part is getting the code instrumentation up. If you use Maven, there's a plug-in to do much of it for you
Yes. That's why I'm amazed there isn't some Zookeeper ish system out there for supporting microservices.
The fact is that microservice tooling is in it's infancy, and shouldn't be used in production unless you're willing to roll your own everything. I worked at a place that tried to use microservices+event sourcing+CQRS, predictably a massive disaster.
I still think the monolith+distributed database will win out . I've never heard of a time when horizontal scaling was a problem not related to the databse
In typical Java fashion, there is a project, Quasar, the adds true green thread support to the language. Done by instrumenting bytecode rather than JVM support, but the benchmarks are still excellent. I'm very curious whether the Java or Go implementation is faster. Java does have fast async support which is all you need to add green threads on a library level
Also in Java fashion, the support isn't perfect, and requires some fiddling with JVM parameters (and annotations, obivously). It's still really solid from my experience however, and a shame that it isn't more widely known.
A partner project Comsat provides fairly comprehensive library support for databases and such. I've used it before with Vert.X and the performance was insane. Possibly faster than Go.
Another aside, there's an active research project to add greaan threads to Javas core as well. Project Loom
Microservices move tranasactional concerns out of the database and between service boundaries. If you ever need to transactionally write data to two different microservices, you need to roll your own rollbacks. And unless you store this rollback state in a reliable datastore, there's no going back. The tooling to do this properly, as far as my research goes, does not currently exist.
I much prefer horizontally scaling a big old monolith backed by a sharding database like CockroachDb or Cassandra. Same scalability and you get to keep some ACID semantics.
Concerns about code size are overblown. Facebook's mobile app is utterly massive and it still runs mostly okay even on weak devices. The maximum practical code size for a monolithic server side app will probably never be reached. We're talking maybe 100 million LoC before you run into real problems, especially if you use a VM lanuage like Java or C# where hot and cold code can be dynamically swapped out and code is stored in a very space-efficient fashion
When you reach the scale where the codebase size is an issue you've probably already several rewrites to deal with such massive traffic volume.
I definitely dont create them routinely. Maybe 4 times a year. Consistency isn't worth much if nobody knows who you are because you never post.
The desire to create a community chafes against the zero verfication HN does for new accounts. If you want to create a community it should be harder to create a new account than login, but it's actually the opposite. To create a new account I don't need to remember my password, I just need a username and keyspam.
This probably isn't what Dang wants but it's how the site currently works. If it's easier to create an account a couple times a year than remember my login, especially when nobody is gonna remember someone who posts 4 times a year, what is the point of maintaining an account. Just being logical here.
I hardly ever post comments and never articles, so I just create an account when it seems worthwhile. The mods don't seem bothered by this as long as such comments aren't flamey
Also keep in mind that the motors are voltage limited at ~15mph. Near that speed, acceleration is basically zero, whereas a bike can accelerate further rather easily.
Acceleration is definitely slower than a bike. Maybe half as much. The scooters are usually 250w but only ~170 makes it to the wheels. Bike riders average 200-300w output and when they first get moving people tend to put in more effort, maybe 400-500 watts. The low speed efficiency of the motors is also terrible, probably less than 100 watts to the ground below 7 mph. I get passed by bikes in straights and between lights every day, and pass only a few bikers a week myself.
Lack of turn signals does suck, I hope they fix this. They should be required. I also agree about visibility and smaller wheels.
I disagree about stability, the center of gravity of the vehicle is much lower, and having your body totally unconstraind with feet inches off the ground makes it far easier to bail. I've flown over the handlebars on a bike more than once because the high CG and large wheels, got severely injured once. Bailing on a scooter is easy and I don't expect anyone in decent shape to get injured because you basically hop off into a brisk run, you can't really do that on a bike.
I've been riding scooters much more than most, close to 5 miles a day, and to me taking one hand off the handlebars is fairly easy. It also feels slower than a bike to me, and sometimes I'll give it a kick start for the first couple seconds. A lot of the reason they feel fast and unstable is because hardly anyone has ridden them much IMO