sink

I would say don't buy this -- but if you had $45k to spend on astronomy, you'd either be extremely passionate and know what you were doing, or you wouldn't care about that money.

Some of the fun of amateur astronomy is that you can take incredible pictures with cobbled together bits and pieces, and rigs are entirely upgradeable and modular. I don't think you can upgrade this thing at all. I don't think you can debug it, tweak it, or otherwise modify it. Hell, it has me to believe that Zicral or whatever brand name for 7075 aluminum is entirely impenetrable.

I've had a blast carefully selecting bits of equipment and incrementally upgrading my rig as I developed new skills.

Also, for $45k, I'd do a fuckload better than this thing. Holy shit would I do better than this thing. I bet I could get better space pictures with $10k than like 12 of these things stacked on top of each other. And if anyone wants to give me $10k, I will happily bet $45k that I can come up with a better picture than this thing.

If you're interested in starting with astrophotography, check out cloudynights.com, the warmest & friendly astronomy forum you could hope for. And the best part about it is -- it's not trying to rip you off!

If you're looking for the Craigslist of astro gear, check out astromart.com

And if you want to see some amazing space pictures by amateur astronomers who spent way, way, way, way less than $45k, check out astrobin.com

With all due respect, I think it's strange to critique something as deeply personal as a technique used in creative writing.

Are there any inhabited and lively MUDS/MUSHes/MUXes still around? I miss those.

Just wait, someone will want to tell you about a lisp they wrote in Ruby, soon.

As a former head of engineering for a mid-sized IoT company with many tens of thousands of devices deployed in the field using a competing product (no, not the AWS one), seeing this made my stomach churn.

This was my second biggest fear after waking up to a ransomware attack.

It's hard to imagine anyone trusting Google for IoT again. I will certainly put them at the bottom of my list for any other infrastructure I develop against in the future, and ensure that we have a documented exit strategy should it come to pass.

The idea of having just one year to develop against a new IoT core, test it, update all deployed devices, and then coordinate logistics and budget to do truck rolls when things invariably go wrong is really grinding my gears.

I feel for all of the startups having to deal with this. To the folks who are invariably scrambling, I really hope you either got advanced notice, or you're getting an extension far beyond what is publicized. Edit: The more I think about this, the more I want to believe there must be contracts in place for certain customers that extend the lifetime of this product beyond what is public. There must be.

IoT is not an easy business. Designing and programming hardware is hard. Supply chains are hard. Maintaining working inventory is hard. Building logistics networks for installation and maintenance is hard. Courting and explaining to investors why you don't have the profit margins of a pure SaaS business is hard. Relying on your cloud provider to give you more than 1 year notice should be the easy part.

cloudynights is a wonderful community for astronomy of all kinds, including astrophotography.

This is something that has been a source of frustration for me.

There are many wonderful and incredibly in-depth communities on Reddit. They only get that way with substantial investment by passionate volunteers who spend the time to moderate, create on-topic original content, and cultivate a community. Many of these bemoan when they appear on the front page because of the sort of attention it attracts.

Yet the direction that Reddit is going with its design and new features is all about optimizing drive-by clicks and shallow engagements. I understand why. That's more ad impressions, and it's more revenue. But it makes the site generally insufferable, and I suspect, reduces the quality of user-produced content.

And on the subject of content, that is what draws the eyeballs, what produces the ad clicks, what drives the revenue. Am I crazy to think that there is a complex, nuanced ethical relationship between those profiting from the content and those producing it? Providing a place to put the content has value, little point in creating content if you have nowhere to put it. But creating content also has value, little point in creating a platform for content if there is no content to put there.

You can see this play out in another format on Youtube (which for a platform is hell on earth as far as I am concerned, even if amazing content can flourish there). At least they are able to share revenue with the content creators, and many folks make a living creating content.

I don't begrudge Reddit for seeking revenue. I want them to not just sustain, but to flourish. And I have no idea how revenue sharing would work in the forum medium. And to be honest, I don't really care to get paid for the words I write there, or the other OC I share. I just want to know what the balance is going to lead to. I have no agency over my content.

So here's a similar question -- as they continue to push the slider further in the direction of more ads and more dark patterns, I can't help but ask, how much is enough? Reddit users are both producers and consumers. I started using Reddit well over a decade ago, and I have a decade's worth of content I have given them. Meanwhile, I agreed to give my eyeballs to some ads, where the word some has a hazy quantification. I get the sense that some number of ads value is being ratcheted up. And I never agreed to that. We never bargained. I can't get my eyeball time back. But I want my content back. The content that Reddit is getting revenue from.

I have the same question for paid online newspapers. I'm more than happy to pay real fiat money from my credit card or bank account for the news. But these news sites, beyond their paywalls, still show ads. Tomorrow, will they show twice as many ads? Maybe. We never negotiated this. I never saw ads mentioned in the rate card. No guarantees were made. Measuring the value of the content is qualitative and a fool's errand. I can quantify the number, type, and size of ads.

I guess the most important question is: do people even care? If there was a forum that users (customers) paid for with a modest fee, transparently described, instead of some exploitative ramping up of ads, would that be an alternative that consumers would to choose?

re Argument definition: I don't think this person is trying to debate you. That's sort of the core of my point. You're giving a really forceful reaction to someone I perceive to be asking clarifying questions. But, since you are perceiving their messages with a different tone, and I'm perceiving your messages with a different tone, and we're never going to find any ground truth, who's to say who is correct?

And if people regularly bleed and cry at my workplace then I think it's reasonable to call that a toxic environment.

Since definitions of terms and semantics are now a part of this Internet conversation, I think we're done here. You can reply once more and have the last word, if you like. :)

I am as equally as surprised by their surprise about how much R&D is involved in making a "simple" lamp.

I think your surprise is justified, especially since you've been in this world for a while. But I think there is an apparent (but not real) contradiction between offering designs for free so people can go and build something themselves, and then charging money for R&D. This is what is meant by the term trade secret.

re: Woodworkers and co -- sometimes. Room & Board doesn't share their designs. Tartine Manufactory probably has a cookbook.

You're reading into the comment an emotion that did not exist when the message was sent. If you read hostility, then that's no what I was trying to infer.

I'm genuinely really happy that this is not the intent. Challenging phrases and Socratic questioning can really come off as hostile.

I'll add one more thing to my sibling comment. This person is clearly unaware of whether there is ongoing R&D in the realm of hobby astrophotography mounts. They mentioned they're just considering getting into it. They're talking about mass manufactured goods. They were not aware that this is a field of active innovation.

We could have given someone a warm welcome to the hobby by clarifying that politely.

I know when I was getting started, I didn't know what made some things more expensive than others. I didn't know about doublet or triplet refractors, Strehl ratios, Chroma vs ZWO filters, why a MACH2 is such a grail mount over a Optron CEM120. Luckily I had nice, friendly, helpful people to talk to, instead of a wall of arrogance.

I don't think this person is trying to argue this. They're asking a sincere question about a non-intuitive aspect of open source company business models, and they just keep getting answers that indirectly answer their questions in a veil of condescension and sarcasm.

This person is trying to have a discussion, you're trying to have an argument.

Developing something like this involves a lot of the designer's literal blood, sweat, and tears

I retain a lot of water so I can see the sweat part. But I think blood and tears are an OSHA concern.

I'm not sure why you're so hostile to the GP.

Their questions are sincere. Your comparison to the M1 is not appropriate, and you're not actually paying attention to what they wrote.

They wrote that they are surprised that R&D makes up the majority of the cost, since this is an open source project. This is a fairly non-obvious feature of open source company business models. They give away the product, and its designs, for free, and solicit community collaboration. But it's usually complex or cumbersome to operationalize or build, so they then sell a set of services or pre-builds around it. Datastax and Confluent are two examples of this in the OSS domain.

Woodworkers don't market their plans as open source, put them on Github, and accept pull requests.

Don't create arrogant, sarcastic responses to sincere questions. It devalues this forum, and it's a bad look.

I think in general your point is correct.

However, this is not a fair comparison. In astrophotography, a primary consideration for the price point of a mount is its instrument weight capacity. The EQ6-R has a weight capacity of 44 lbs. This astrotracker has a capacity of 5.5lbs. The difference is, well, massive.

The EQ6-R also has other features, like a built-in polar scope and a periodic error correction. Mounts are also a lot like cars, in that some consumers purchase them for the level of support offered by the manufacturer, and perception of reliability.

With that said, I know I'm burying the lead and focusing on the wrong subject. $200 is very reasonable to get something that will probably provide very good initial results, and get that astrophotography addiction started. And I'm really happy this exists, at this price point.

I don't want to suggest the parent poster is really reinforcing this attitude, but in this hobby (and let me stress, it's a hobby), there is an occasional subtext that expensive gear is the only way to get great results. I don't think that's the case. You can spend as much as you want, of course, and money will let you do more things, but at the end of the day, we're just making sciencey art.

I'm not sure I would agree with that.

Measures are being taken, and the Japanese government believes that the rate of infection is still very much growing [1]. Schools have been shut down in Japan. And while the government is not actively enforcing quarantining, that may be due to bureaucratic roadblocks. [2]

[1] https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2020/03/8aafa8e3636c-loca...

[2] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/03/11/national/politi...

True! I missed that.

Digging into it, they also had an incredible testing network, which is claimed to be a key differentiator. In the US, the government is actively telling people not to get tested on their own judgements.

I too would prefer much better visibility over a shelter in place order. Unfortunately, we have next to no visibility. So lacking that, I would prefer dramatic measures.

It's fairly easy to reason about the factors that go into the spread of the disease. We have diligent data from Japan, Korea, Spain, and Italy. All show infection curves with very similar shapes along the same timelines. What's more, we can see how quarantining measures have benefited Japan and Korea. Not to mention that the spread of infectious diseases, especially the flu, has been studying quite heavily with modern scientific methods for over a century.

It is far more likely that these measures are being taken because they have been proven effective to prevent harm to citizens, than as a conspiracy to destroy small businesses.

This disease is both very infectious and relatively very deadly. We know that the death rate can double or triple if emergency health care is not available. We also know that without dramatic quarantining measures, the number of people requiring emergency care will overwhelm our health care capacity.

I am a San Francisco resident, and I am grateful that my local government is taking action. I agree with Mayor Breed's assessment that the federal government's response is terrible.

Dwelo | San Francisco | Software Engineer | Full-Time | ONSITE

Edit: I want to add that the slogan, 'Target cancer, not ads,' in 10x Genomics' posting is the greatest thing I've seen all month. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21422482

Dwelo is the operating system for apartment communities. Our IoT platform is the infrastructure enables the owners and managers of buildings to improve the efficiency of their operations while offering smart homes as an amenity to their residents. We're live in tens of thousands of apartment units, in well over two hundred communities, coast to coast in the United States.

We are now working on taking what we've learned building an apartment-centric product and turning it into an open API for managing devices in commercial, people-oriented spaces.

More about what we are building and what we value: We process an absurd amount of sensor readings and device commands every day. We want to put this information to good use to help building owners make sound ecological decisions about saving water, energy, heat, and more. Our entire engineering team cares deeply about privacy and personal security, and we want to ensure our product is built with those fundamental principles. We know that our customers rely on our systems working all the time, every time, and our motto is, 'Move fast and build secure, verified, fault-tolerant systems.'

We are looking for people with 4 or more years of industry experience to work with us building our cloud APIs and data services supporting our IoT platform. We are especially interested in talking to engineers who build with Python, Rust, and Scala.

If this sounds exciting to you (and I hope it does) please go ahead and shoot me an email with a CV / resume to scott at dwelo.com ... Or you can check out our careers page: dwelo.com/careers

I've never worked with them directly, but I've been looking at making a little game using Rust for some time. This site has been really helpful for library discovery and examples. I'd imagine there's a good amount of image processing and some linear algebra goes into these libs: http://arewegameyet.com/

Dwelo | San Francisco Bay Area & Draper, Utah | Software Engineer | Full-Time | ONSITE Dwelo is the operating system for apartment communities. Our IoT platform is the infrastructure enables the owners and managers of multifamily properties (think, apartment buildings) to improve the efficiency of their operations while offering smart homes as an amenity to their residents. We're live in several thousand apartment units, in well over one hundred communities, coast to coast in the United States.

More about what we are building and what we value: We process an absurd amount of sensor readings and device commands every day. We want to put this information to good use to help building owners make sound ecological decisions about saving water, energy, heat, and more. Our entire engineering team cares deeply about privacy and personal security, and we want to ensure our product is built with those fundamental principles. We know that our customers rely on our systems working all the time, every time, and our motto is, 'Move fast and build secure, verified, fault-tolerant systems.'

We are looking for people with 4 or more years of industry experience to work with us building our cloud APIs and data services supporting our IoT platform. We are especially interested in talking to engineers who build with Python, Rust, and Scala.

If this sounds exciting to you (and I hope it does) please go ahead and shoot me an email with a CV / resume to scott at dwelo.com ... Or you can check out our careers page: dwelo.com/careers

Thank you! I found your site long ago and I’ve enjoyed every article. I often wondered what your plan for it was and would be. This puts a little closure on it. I feel the same way about advertising and wonder what alternate business models could happily maintain such a place while keeping it mostly free and open.

Dwelo | San Francisco Bay Area | Software Engineer | Full-Time | ONSITE

Dwelo is the operating system for apartment communities. Our IoT platform is the infrastructure enables the owners and managers of multifamily properties (think, apartment buildings) to improve the efficiency of their operations while offering smart homes as an amenity to their residents. We're live in several thousand apartment units, in well over one hundred communities, coast to coast in the United States.

More about what we are building and what we value: We process an absurd amount of sensor readings and device commands every day. We want to put this information to good use to help building owners make sound ecological decisions about saving water, energy, heat, and more. Our entire engineering team cares deeply about privacy and personal security, and we want to ensure our product is built with those fundamental principles. We know that our customers rely on our systems working all the time, every time, and our motto is, 'Move fast and build secure, verified, fault-tolerant systems.'

We are looking for people with 4 or more years of industry experience to work with us building our cloud APIs and data services supporting our IoT platform. We are especially interested in talking to engineers who build with Python, Rust, and Scala.

If this sounds exciting to you (and I hope it does) please go ahead and shoot me an email with a CV / resume to scott at dwelo.com ... Or you can check out our careers page: dwelo.com/careers

Dwelo | San Francisco Bay Area | Software Engineer | Full-Time | ONSITE

Dwelo is the operating system for apartment communities. Our IoT platform is the infrastructure enables the owners and managers of multifamily properties (think, apartment buildings) to improve the efficiency of their operations while offering smart homes as an amenity to their residents. We're live in several thousand apartment units, in well over one hundred communities, coast to coast in the United States.

More about what we are building and what we value: We process an absurd amount of sensor readings and device commands every day. We want to put this information to good use to help building owners make sound ecological decisions about saving water, energy, heat, and more. Our entire engineering team cares deeply about privacy and personal security, and we want to ensure our product is built with those fundamental principles. We know that our customers rely on our systems working all the time, every time, and our motto is, 'Move fast and build secure, verified, fault-tolerant systems.'

We are looking for people with 4 or more years of industry experience to work with us building our cloud APIs and data services supporting our IoT platform. We are especially interested in talking to engineers who build with Python, Rust, and Scala.

If this sounds exciting to you (and I hope it does) please go ahead and shoot me an email with a CV / resume to scott at dwelo.com ... Or you can check out our careers page: dwelo.com/careers

Dwelo | San Francisco Bay Area | Software Engineer | Full-Time | ONSITE

Dwelo is the operating system for apartment communities. Our software, hardware, and service platform enables the owners and managers of multifamily properties (think, apartment buildings) to offer smart homes as an amenity to their residents while also improving the efficiency of their operations. We're live in thousands of apartment units, in over one hundred communities, coast to coast in the United States.

We are looking for people with 4 or more years of industry experience to work with us building our cloud APIs and data services supporting our IoT platform. We are especially interested in talking to engineers who build with Python, Rust, and Scala.

If this sounds exciting to you (and I hope it does) please go ahead and shoot me an email with a CV / resume to scott at dwelo.com Or you can check out our careers page: dwelo.com/careers

Dwelo | Quality Engineers / Site Reliability Engineers | Full Time | San Francisco Bay Area and Salt Lake City | Full Time

Dwelo is the operating system for apartment communities. Our software, hardware, and service platform enables the owners and managers of multifamily properties (think, apartment buildings) to offer smart homes as an amenity to their residents while also improving the efficiency of their operations. In the last few months we've invested heavily in the metering and data analysis side of our business. And we have been integrating with devices outside of apartment units to bring entire buildings online. The engineering work we do has hardware (IoT, cellular, zwave and other forms of connectivity) and cloud (AWS, Twilio Sync) components. We are especially interested in talking to engineers who build with Python, Rust, and Scala. However, anyone who loves to see their software manifest real life effects on the corporeal world, or do predictive analytics on millions of sensor readings from networked devices, or create a magical and eminently accessible experience in the homes and communities of our residents and the operations teams that support them should talk to us.

Dwelo | Software Engineers / Devops / QA | Full Time | San Francisco Bay Area and Salt Lake City | Full Time Dwelo is the operating system for apartment communities. Our software, hardware, and service platform enables the owners and managers of multifamily properties (think, apartment buildings) to offer smart homes as an amenity to their residents while also improving the efficiency of their operations. In the last few months we've invested heavily in the metering and data analysis side of our business. And we have been integrating with devices outside of apartment units to bring entire buildings online.

The engineering work we do has hardware (IoT, cellular, zwave and other forms of connectivity) and cloud (AWS, Twilio Sync) components. We are especially interested in talking to engineers who build with Python, Rust, and Scala. However, anyone who loves to see their software manifest real life effects on the corporeal world, or do predictive analytics on millions of sensor readings from networked devices, or create a magical and eminently accessible experience in the homes and communities of our residents and the operations teams that support them should talk to us.

I'm at scott at dwelo dot com

Dwelo | Software Engineers | Full Time | San Francisco Bay Area and Salt Lake City | Full Time

Dwelo is the operating system for apartment communities. Our software, hardware, and service platform enables the owners and managers of multifamily properties (think, apartment buildings) to offer smart homes as an amenity to their residents while also improving the efficiency of their operations. In the last few months we've invested heavily in the metering and data analysis side of our business. And we have been integrating with devices outside of apartment units to bring entire buildings online.

The engineering work we do has hardware (IoT, cellular, zwave and other forms of connectivity) and cloud (AWS, Twilio Sync) components. We are especially interested in talking to engineers who build with Python, Rust, and Scala. However, anyone who loves to see their software manifest real life effects on the corporeal world, or do predictive analytics on millions of sensor readings from networked devices, or create a magical and eminently accessible experience in the homes and communities of our residents and the operations teams that support them should talk to us.

I'm at scott at dwelo dot com

This isn't really about Ruby. It's about the other things in the title. I suppose that calling out Ruby by name was necessary to make this blog post concrete, and to make it easier to relate to. The author also mentions Haskell, but that really isn't necessary to get the point across. The comparison could have been between Python (written in an OO fashion) and ML.

You can write, 'I hate X because of dynamic typing, side effects, and object-oriented programming' for many values of X. Similarly, the reasons why the author is drawn to Haskell can be applied to a large number of other languages.

Dwelo | Software Engineers | San Francisco Bay Area and Salt Lake City | Full Time

Dwelo is the operating system for apartment communities. Our software, hardware, and service platform enables the owners and managers of multifamily properties to offer smart homes as an amenity to their residents while simultaneously improving the efficiency of their operations.

The engineering work we do has hardware (IoT, cellular, zwave and other forms of connectivity) and cloud (AWS, Twilio Sync) components. We are especially interested in talking to engineers who build with Python, Rust, and Scala. However, anyone who loves to see their software manifest real life effects on the corporeal world, or do predictive analytics on millions of sensor readings from networked devices, or create a magical and eminently accessible experience in the homes and communities of our residents and the operations teams that support them should talk to us.

scott at dwelo dot com

Twilio | San Francisco, CA / Mountain View, CA | Full Time

We're a cloud communications platform for messaging, voice, and video communications.

I'm a developer on the messaging team in San Francisco, and we're looking for more software engineers to join us in building high volume, fault tolerant distributed systems. We send many, many millions of messages every day and we're expanding our reach through channels like Facebook, Viber, and others.

We build services on top of AWS using Scala, with libraries like Akka and Cats. Scala experience is not at all required. Other technologies we use include Kafka, Spark, Cassandra and MySQL.

Here is the messaging job posting: https://boards.greenhouse.io/twilio/jobs/147129#.V5-TQ9ArKL4

Twilio is hiring for many other engineering roles: https://www.twilio.com/company/jobs

Why is a Google form required to ensure that my information is never used in any way?

Aaron Cheung, I would appreciate it if you didn't taint YC's brand with your questionable business practices.