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schmidtc

77 karma

spatial analysis + scientific computing + web developer

http://geoscore.com

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But, there is a clear incentive to answer the question incorrectly. The wrong answer is funny and will give the human some level of pleasure thinking about it. I would certainly reply with "walk" just for fun and apparently 28.5% of people agree with me.

Going back to your slippery slope argument, where does it end?

Is HN not a public forum as well? Are my constitutional rights being violated when a moderator deletes something a post here on HN?

What about all those shadow banned users, are they entitled to their free speech on any website that allows comments?

It's always fascinating how quick people are to jump on the slippery slope bandwagon when it suits their ends.

Your suggestion that privately held malls are subject to free speech protections is misleading. See Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner. There are counter examples of course, be these apply only in niche situations.

Regardless, Facebook is not a public space. It's very much a private space. Suggesting that Facebook be treated as a public space is a pretty radical idea.

The actions are policed and no one here is suggesting thoughts be policed. These individuals are free to shout their ideas in the public square. Facebook is a corporation not a government agency and they have the right to control their own products. Facebook isn’t refusing people based a protected status. Should a baker be required to make a cake promoting a hateful cause?

I run a small 4 node mesos cluster. So far it's been great, took a day or two to setup and has been running for about a year now with little to no maintenance. (I should probably update). I launch long running services through Marathon and crons with Chronos. I use haproxy for service discovery and load balancing. It's mostly used for data processing, but does serve data to a production web environment (~40k req / day).

The things I like the most about mesos is that it is light weight and removes a like of the friction in deploying new services. So I can test out a new idea without a big investment or f*ing around with the giant monolith. I found container based approaches too resource intensive for my budget.

Creator of geoScore here. We're looking for contributors to help get this code out and help with documentation. I'll do my best to answer any questions. As far as the javascript client, it is almost ready to release, but I'll be a lot more motivated to put the hours in if there's interest.

just for fun...

  import itertools
  colors = ["brown", "red", "green", "yellow", "yellow", "brown", "brown", "black"]
  dict([(color, len(list(grp))) for color, grp in itertools.groupby(sorted(colors))])
or
  dict([(color, len(filter(lambda c: c==color, colors))) for color in set(colors)])
...because sometimes job security is important too.
Why we travel 11 years ago

That's not entirely true. Travel can be done on the cheap, many people don't even explore their own city. People who don't travel find a million excuses, but it usually boils down to fear of the unknown.

Can anyone provide a legitimate criticism of Kafka? "It sucks, doesn't use it" isn't very helpful or productive. The closest thing I can find is http://engineering.onlive.com/2013/12/12/didnt-use-kafka/ which is more critical of zookeeper then anything else.

I'm evaluating Kafka for a new project and it seems to be a perfect fit. I've contemplated building something from scratch in python, as my reliability and performance demands are pretty minimal. However, it seems that a lot of thought went into Kafka's design and it's feature set is perfect match for my problem. Specifically the unlimited buffering, log compaction and the ability to replay logs from arbitrary offsets.

If there are any viable alternatives to Kafka what are they? Bonus points if the JVM isn't involved.

Before the Startup 12 years ago

The general idea of the essay is, i think, spot on. However, like you say it's a bit idealistic. In practice the mountain of student debt facing your average college grad changes the nature of the discussion.

I would build a new city. Not some attempt at utopia, but a fresh start in a remote but desirable destination. The town would be seeded with a university and focused on outdoor recreation, startup (and self-employment) culture, and diversity. Basic employment would include the university, but also tourism and startup incubators. Non-basic would initially include something like a brew-pub and grocery store. Basic amenities would include subsidized internet, alternative energy grants, public transportation to outdoor recreation and nearest major airport. The planning of the city would be based on Traditional Neighborhood Design and include a large buffer zone to prevent sprawl.

HN Hiring mapped 12 years ago

Someday I want to visit (0,0), lots of interesting things happen at the center of euclidean earth.

I've been thinking about open sourcing my source code as well. I've been trying to monetize a new mapping technique and I think there just isn't demand for it. So now I'm leaning toward open sourcing the mapping tech and trying to build a business the uses the maps to solve part of a larger problem (like real estate search, or business relocation).

My biggest fear would be one of the big mapping companies picking it up and taking credit for it. Though I'm sure this is unfounded and even if it happens at least people get to use it.

Forgot to mention, price was another difficult problem. We were trying to build a low cost system for academic use. The single most expensive component was the flight computer, there were some low cost alternatives, but at the time they didn't perform we'll enough. Perhaps this has changed.

I started a UAV company several years ago. The biggest hurdle we faced was governed regulation. Not only was it nearly impossible to operate the things I the US, it was also exceedingly difficult to get an export license. I haven't been paying attention since I left the comply a few years ago, but it sounds like the regulations are getting better.

On the technical side we faced a few chanllanges. The first was reliability. Our planes were small <10 lbs, but would enevitly go down and be very difficult to recover. After the first couple crashes we designed a protective shell around the expensive bits. Causes of the crashes we always unique, from a loose connection, to interference.

The next biggest problem was battery life, ours was an electric system and getting more flight time in the tiny platform was difficult. This of course limited the range which limited it usefullness.

Otherwise, we solved the autonomy with off-the-shelve components (albeit military grade). Otherwise most other issues were resolved with software (flight planning, data recovery, etc).

Our application was aerial imaging, I imagine other applications would have another set of problems.