flexer2

NoraSector: https://app.norasector.com/ -- real-time police/fire/EMS scanner for the Seattle area. Uses custom SDR software that can capture entire radio systems and streams with sub-second latency to clients, along with recordings.

For all sorts of reasons I decided not to monetize it. I've had some inquiries to use it for newsrooms and in certain states that have laws that require radio traffic be published online. I explored some of that but could never come to agreement on a price that would be worth my time to support. I also considered monetizing with ads and having a premium membership, but it's a little too niche and expanding to more regions requires more investment than I'm willing to make.

King County is migrating to a new digital system in the near future, and if they encrypt everything then it's dead in the water anyway.

Costs me about $200/mo in hosting fees to run, plus about $1400 for the machine/SDR that captures the radio traffic. I use it myself and don't mind sharing it with the handful of people who listen to it. If/when the access is cut off, I'll shut it down.

Fusion360 is the only thing I run a VM for. There’s a repo out there that sets up wine and installs it but it just doesn’t work very well at all. I’m using VMWare Player and set up the virtual disk to boot from the Windows drive and run it that way. It works really well. Other 3D printing stuff like PrusaSlicer works great on Linux. I’d love to have a native version of Fusion though. Maybe someday.

Extremely wealthy people (i.e. 9-digit+ net worth) have teams of lawyers and accountants that figure out the optimal way to allocate the client's cash to achieve their goals. That may or may not include incurring debt, etc. Rich people borrow money too (not because they need to, but because it ultimately can make more financial sense to do so).

(there are of course exceptions to this, there are rich people bad with money or who want to look like they're richer than they actually are, but in general rich people stay rich by being smart about their money)

Sounds like you should contact a lawyer.

Planes are extremely expensive pieces of machinery and you don't make money if you're not flying passengers with them. I'd be more surprised if they weren't in the air as many hours as possible.

It's for delivery.

typo, fixed

Amazon Flex does this as well. I signed up to do deliveries last year to see how it worked, and on a couple occasions gamed it such that I was able to deliver an order I placed to myself (which is really just ordering from a nearby restaurant and hoping you get the offer). The advertised pay I would get for the delivery before accepting it was $7-12 (the range is supposed to account for tips, and across all deliveries, when everything settled it was almost always the low end of that range). With Amazon Restaurants, you had to tip when you ordered, and couldn't change afterwards, and my tip was $3. When everything cleared, I got $7, and I knew $3 of that was my own tip to myself. Had I tipped $0, I would still have gotten $7. I always felt it was a crummy thing to do to people -- your tip was just making Amazon give the driver less money. Not being able to change the tip also sucked, as I don't like tipping when I haven't received anything yet. That's more of a "name your price" service fee.

Amazon has dropped out of the restaurant game, but they still probably do this for Prime Now and Whole Foods (package deliveries aren't eligible for tips). The funny thing with restaurants was during peak times, when they didn't have enough drivers, they'd send out guaranteed $22 offers to delivery maybe $20 worth of food, which I always pounced on as it was incredibly easy money. It's no wonder they couldn't keep that business going.

Tips sometimes worked out well, though -- on some Prime Now routes where it was maybe $20-30 guaranteed, I'd get over $60 after tips. So they weren't always keeping everything to themselves. I could never figure out the rhyme or reason behind any of it.

We use ES heavily. Most of our queries are basic document filtering plus some geospatial stuff. We could probably have done it with Postgres/PostGIS, but with AWS manages ES, it's all "good enough" -- we can do geospatial searches on millions of documents with response times around 100ms. The other part I like about ES is how it's easy to scale out across machines, which lets us handle quite a bit of load and tolerate failures easily. We have a cluster of 5 m4.large instances and it only runs us about $600/mo. Like others have said, tuning AWS ES sucks, but it's always been good enough for us.

We've run into some pain points like trying to index very large shapes into a geospatial index, but have workarounds for basically everything now. We also had a problem where when AWS had the outage around autoscaling groups a few months ago, we lost 3/5 of our instances and had to reindex some data from backups. That was the worst thing that's happened.

I'm sure there would be better/faster/cheaper ways of doing what we do, but for what we get out of the box for the price, it's going to take a lot for us to move away from it for now.

I wrote up a Medium post about what I do with mine: https://medium.com/@adamargo/how-i-use-raspberry-pis-for-hom...

Mostly home automation. 1x homebridge server, ffmpeg transcoder for security cameras, 1x for controlling an electric fireplace using an IR shield and power monitoring outlet, 1x for controlling model train switches and bridging that into HomeKit

There's a pretty simple optimization in the labels you can do, but it doesn't really help that much. The first block of letters is XORing with one set of primes that follow a common pattern, but the second one is stumping me. I let it run overnight and basically made no progress once it hit the second block.

This seems like a waste of money on the surface. The concerns over privacy seem a little silly given the hundreds of CCTV cameras that monitor the stores already, though.

One thing I like about their business model is that it isn't just the autonomous/teleoperation tech, but also that they're a full-service trucking company. That kind of integration should hopefully allow them to provide the same service as a normal trucking company but with much lower cost.

Even if the company just serves long-haul routes from depots in less congested areas very close to freeway on-ramps, that's still a huge market, and the labor cost savings would likely be huge if humans are just driving from the depot to the freeway.

Related, I was thinking about the idea of teleoperation for drone deliveries recently as well. The same kind of "last mile" problem exists for landing cargo from a drone. Have the drone fly from the warehouse to the customer location, and then pass it over to someone sitting in their house with a joystick to control landing and delivery of the cargo. Once the delivery is complete and the drone is airborne again, have it fly autonomously back to the depot. Pay people $1/landing or something like that.

The last mile is going to be the hardest part of any of these autonomous businesses. The hybrid teleoperation model where the computer handles the relatively easy (but mundane) parts makes total sense.

I've been fully remote for the past two years at a company that is mostly distributed (we have to have physical operations in markets we operate in, but the tech team is fully remote).

Overall, I love it, and it would be a challenge to go back to the office/commuting lifestyle. However, I still recognize that it is a nascent thing and I'm incredibly fortunate to work where I do. If the business goes under, will I be able to find comparable remote work with good pay?

To hedge that bet, I still live in one of the larger tech hub cities (born and raised here, so I also don't want to leave it). The thought has crossed my mind many times to move to cheaper locales and take advantage of the potential wage arbitrage that would come with it, but in the end, I like my expensive coastal city, and think it's worth the price. And if push comes to shove, I can commute into an office and make a living.

We have periodic offsites where everyone travels to a single place for a week, and those are great to get to know the people behind the webcam. With Slack, Zoom, Google Docs, Github, etc., it really doesn't feel that much different than working in an office after awhile. The hardest part is learning that with remote work, you have to intentionally overcommunicate. When you're in an office you can get a sense of the vibe, which basically goes away when you're remote. It's really important for a company to focus on maintaining culture when you don't see each other in person every day.

If I were to found a company, odds are, I'd try to establish it as a remote-first culture (assuming the business could support it, which not all companies will ever be able to do). It just makes sense for a good number of tech startups.

The lifestyle isn't for everyone -- some people really thrive in the office environment, and that's great, but the flexibility of remote work is something I wouldn't trade for the world. I'm sure I'm leaving a little money on the table by not working for a local tech company and commuting, but the 10 hours a week I don't spend commuting are time I can spend with my kids, and I'm saving money in other areas like no gas or bus fare or eating out for lunch every day.

I think remote work is "a" future (not "the" future) and could be a great fit for many companies, especially businesses that do most of their work online. However, offices will never go away completely, and that's fine, too.

We have a Peloton bike. We used to be Flywheel members, at $300/mo, and that's pretty pricy. The bike pays for itself quickly if that's what you're replacing.

The class content is good. It's available anytime. Our friends have one so we can do rides together. And we're not paying $300/mo to Flywheel anymore.

Unfortunately we don't have a solarium to put it in, so we are really rubes.

In principle I agree with the author, but some of the patterns these big companies have introduced are valuable for companies with significantly lower amounts of traffic. For instance, in the article they reference Kafka. In one of our products, we use Kinesis, which has similar semantics, for data that is no more than 25k records per day. However, we find it useful because it enables us to have multiple consumers that operate independently, plus using Kinesis Firehose to automatically archive those records off to S3. We just use a single shard, which is more than enough throughput for us. We don't have any plans to scale to hundreds of shards, but find what it provides to be very useful in separating what each process does, and makes the code much simpler. And if we ever did need to scale, it wouldn't be much work to do so.

One of my most used tools with pipes on the Mac is `pbcopy`, which copies whatever you're piping to the clipboard.

Copying your public key somewhere? `cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | pbcopy`

Pretty-printing some JSON you copied from a log file? `pbpaste | jq . | pbcopy`

It's one of those little tools I use daily and don't think about much, but it's incredibly useful.

I inherited a Canon PowerShot 350 from a dead relative back in the late 90s. I was still blown away that I could take pictures that went straight to the computer with reasonable quality.

By today's standards it's garbage of course, but it was a cool camera at the time. The thing I find most disappointing is how useless they are -- there's no real value in them; they're not like old film cameras where you can still take good, interesting photos.

It's fun to see the evolution of technology, as now my iPhone XS is vastly superior to most things on this list, and of course my big Nikon DSLR blows them all away.

The Echo does this with Spotify too, fwiw. I ended up creating a separate account in my Spotify family for the Echo to link to Spotify, which is less than ideal as you lose your personal playlists, etc.

I had a cab driver do this to me once, in 2016 or so. He dropped me off at the destination and told me it’d be $20 or whatever, cash only. I didn’t have cash on me, and said all I had was a card. He demanded that I prove I had no cash. Being a little dumbstruck and just wanting to get away from him I showed my empty wallet and he begrudgingly pulled out a phone with a square reader on it. Left a very sour taste in my mouth about cabs.

It’s no surprise why Uber/Lyft are eating their lunch.

libpostal is a pretty incredible open source project, but addresses are so complicated and nuanced that depending on what you’re doing, it might not be able to keep up. I work for a real estate tech company where we do a lot of address parsing and we had to move away from it because it’s just not quite powerful enough to handle all of the edge cases you find in US addresses. Right now we use SmartyStreets because their address parser is a bit better for our use case. Libpostal is a great general purpose library but depending on what level of accuracy you need, you might have to look for alternatives.

I spent time trying to use libpostal and build USPS address normalization rules on top of it but there are so many edge cases it was more cost effective to just purchase a solution from a vendor.

That is not to take away from this project — it’s quite good for a broad set of addresses across the world — but for narrow use cases such as ours it just couldn’t quite cut it.

My dad spent his career as a natural gas pipeline technician. For a long time they maintained their own radio towers and VHF or UHF (I forget which) radio network. Each district had their own comms guy who maintained the network, and it was very resilient and reliable, allowing the entire company to be in contact essentially anywhere.

In the early 2000s as a cost cutting measure, the company decided to nix the radios for satellite phones on each truck. Of course this proved to be problematic, as the sat phones often had reception issues. They relied on cell phones as backups, which was also quite foolish as the remote compressor stations had very poor reception. They also had issues where someone would leave a voicemail and they wouldn’t get notified of it for days or weeks due to some issue with AT&T.

After a couple emergencies where communication was identified as a big issue, they proposed moving back to the old radio system, but they had already sold off the frequencies and dismantled the infrastructure. My dad retired not long after this, but the “corporate bean counter” trope rang quite true here, and in the long run we were all a little less safe because some executive with no field experience wanted to make a name for themself by saving a little money on something that proved to be mission critical.

I deleted mine in early 2017. I still have a “burner” account though. It was from back in the days when you needed a .edu address, and I figured out there was an alternate domain at my school that could be used to receive emails to the same mailbox. I’ve had that account since 2004. I use that to look people up, but I never post on it.

I do not miss Facebook in any way, nor do I feel I am missing out on any social stuff without one. My wife deleted hers as well and found it to be incredibly liberating. If someone wants to get in contact me, they’ll find a way. I generally prefer it if people don’t, though.

They still use them although where I live it just seems to be for larger packages. Most stuff is delivered to me by Flex drivers now. I agree, though, they are the absolute worst.

This guy was probably just a Flex driver. I’ve had bad experiences with them, too, but OnTrac is much worse.

I have delivered thousands of packages through the Amazon Flex program; I am quite well-versed in their policies. There is no such incentive policy to return undeliverable packages as he claims. If you are out making deliveries, and you can’t deliver a package for whatever reason, you mark it as undeliverable in the app and return it to the station after your route is complete. That’s just part of the gig. It sucks because you might have to go out of your way to bring back the packages to the station (using your own gas and time), so the real incentive is to deliver the package, even if it’s risky.

This guy is just a lying thief. There is no such program.

Edit: I should add that Amazon keeps track of your delivery metrics, including the percent that are undelivered/late/reported missing (DNR, did not receive)/etc. If you drop below some threshold you get kicked off the app. You get a weekly email with a summary of your stats. I think I had a couple DNRs out of the thousands of things I delivered, and was paranoid they were going to kick me off for them.