Is the Toilet Free? | Hacker News Reader

Is the Toilet Free?

madebymany.com

229 pointsvirmundi122 comments

From http://www.npr.org/2012/03/19/148777350/how-creativity-works...:

"[Jobs] insisted there be only two bathrooms in the entire Pixar studios, and that these would be in the central space. And of course this is very inconvenient. No one wants to have to walk 15 minutes to go to the bathroom. And yet Steve insisted that this is the one place everyone has to go every day. And now you can talk to people at Pixar and they all have their 'bathroom story.' They all talk about the great conversation they had while washing their hands.

" ... He wanted there to be mixing. He knew that the human friction makes the sparks, and that when you're talking about a creative endeavor that requires people from different cultures to come together, you have to force them to mix; that our natural tendency is to stay isolated, to talk to people who are just like us, who speak our private languages, who understand our problems. But that's a big mistake. And so his design was to force people to come together even if it was just going to be in the bathroom."

These kind of projects are awesome. They may seem "pointless" or "a waste of time" to some PHB-types but they're a wonderful showcase of a great, true-hacker culture and I bet they do a ton for morale. I hope that any future startup I'm involved with has this sort of culture - it's a goal I'll aim for.

Well done guys.

Nothing is pointless. :)

I wired one of these tasteless gnomes (http://www.robertdyas.co.uk/meerkat-solar-light) up to our build server with a Raspberry Pi (which also plays sound effects). It has to be the most ridiculous thing I have ever claimed expenses for!

Seemed silly at the time but now everyone loves it. No one has to be the guy that tells you that you broke the build. The anger is all directed at the meerkat and you can't ignore it like you ignore emails.

I do always find it funny when some companies say they value "innovation" but look at things like this and think its a "waste". I mean, you can't really be innovative without also encouraging a culture where you can experiment.

shameless plug -- if you like "pointless" projects, check-out Pointless Corporation -- http://www.pointlesscorp.com

I think this is not at all a waste of time if it means that employees can be spending more time at their desks and doing work instead of waiting for a toilet. The fact that they were motivated enough to build such a system is an indication that there was a large amount of time spent waiting.

Or that they need more toilets.

Moreover, the concept is quite abstract and has many similar applications. I used to work in a scenario when there was a specific gateway resource that was needed to be run by every developer for executing his code, was very expensive and people would annoy each other by suddenly remote logging into machine and disturbing others. Then we came up with a resource locking / waiting and current state showing software, along with estimates of when which machine would be free, so you could request a reserve slot. Some sophistication included things like how much of it was actually used by you vs reservation time so it could adjust appropriately.

Raspberry Pi is great and easy to work with. I got it, I don't need 5 inane projects per day to remind me about it.

I particularly like this one, but for me life is too short to waste time in useless projects.

If you're enjoying yourself and having fun, it's not a waste of time.

Creating useful things is also very fun. And takes about the same time/energy.

Anyway, doing stuff with a raspberry pi has no hacker merits IMHO. Anybody can connect stuff to a portable supercomputer and make it do things.

Perhaps there is some (elitist) disinterest floating in the air, maybe due to empathy being wanting. I also think this is an uninteresting and quite badly-done thing, but whoever did it had fun in the process and learned a couple of things in the process, and I think this deserves a lot of appreciation.

What you're probably trying to communicate (maybe in an overly-honest way) is that there is a great disparity between the function being performed and the power of the hardware there. The main obstacle the author encountered was his lack of knowledge related to electronics and embedded systems, not the scarcity of resources or the difficulty of the problem (or both) that are typically considered hacky. This is very much equivalent to writing the well-known Currency Converter application in Scala. On a quad-core system. You don't see much of that on HN.

I know people in my field (embedded systems) who, like me, are somewhat embittered by the "Arduino" and the "RPi" culture. The rate at which I have to explain why something is inadequate for mass manufacturing, unsafe, sub-optimal or outright disastrous to people who think transistors have holes in them but are really convinced <something> is simple because they did it in node.js, on their PIs, with a couple of wires and arduino shields hooked up, has probably tripled since the Pi became popular. But not everyone who is happy about how a small hack they did works is also an arrogant asshole, and we should probably remember that before bashing them.

So you're basically saying that you're only a "hacker" if you do stuff with hardware. That is completely upside down, if not borderline elitist.

Building stuff and "hacking" has no requirement for hardware. It hasn't been that way for a long while. Now excuse me while I gladly take our Raspberry Pis, Arduinos and "software" thingimaggigs off your precious lawn.

Chill dude, call yourself a hacker if you wish, has no strict definition anyway. I believe "fun" and "easy" projects have no merits, them being hardware/software/whatever (unless you are in high-school)

It's nice to make one once in a while, but if you only do fun and easy projects then you are wasting your life. You should try to push yourself to make things that are not easy. Get outside your comfort zone. Doing stuff with a supercomputer like the raspberry pi is easy (BTW also, it is very cheap, and sometimes projects are good only because of that).

You might have a point from a technical perspective, but I think these kinds of technically easy projects show their worth in other ways.

In this case, the builders had to think about their users, the best way to notify people, the kind of notifications which would work best (active/passive) and in doing so, they've just strengthened those neural pathways that are involved in this sort of customer-focused thinking.

The fact that it's technically easy just means that it was a lightweight thing to do which didn't take up much time at all and generally improved morale. I think that's a good thing.

Well, then we obviously differ in our definitions of "not wasting" our lives. I find time spent creating something/anything as worthwhile, whereas you find time spent being challenged as worthwhile. In the end we're both creating something; spawning usefulness from our own doing. It's still a learning experience, even if you're not overly technically challenged or frustrated.

Just because something isn't difficult, doesn't mean it isn't useful. And sometimes people just enjoying doing stuff. Do you enjoy watching a movie, or reading fiction, or just sitting and chatting with friends?

Yes I do enjoy movies but I'm not constantly looking at movies. Also, easy and useful is the best kind of useful. Easy and useless is well, useless.

I guess yours is the only correct definition of a "useful thing".

I remember, about 25 years ago, a HUD on each an ever train carriage would indicate whether the toilet was occupied. The HUD was located above the baggage section at the end of each carriage. Occupied was red, and unoccupied was blank. No Raspberry Pi was involved, but through careful social engineering, everyone in the carriage know what the sign meant, There was a physical hardware based fall-back also, which was an indicator on the 'toilet room' with not both red but 'OCCUPIED' displayed on the door, the operating process of which consisted of one locking the door.

This is not to discredit train bathroom engineers decades ago. Ensuring a piece of bathroom machinery operates consistently for up to thousands of miles per day with usage analysis certainty included is a very admirable achievement.

Decades later... the same efforts but in a small scale static environmental setting are posted to a website called Hacker News.

Good observations, but let's also review what this does accomplish. The train system is reliant on mechanical linkage and line-of-sight, so can serve only a limited audience. While the Pi-powered version scales, making the toilet status accessible to everyone everywhere in the world by leveraging the connectivity of the Internet.

>While the Pi-powered version scales

It scales but the endpoint probably doesn't scale ( I don't know if 1 toilet can easily serve 100 people)

I'm not sure what's your point; I'm pretty sure this isn't being upvoted because people consider it an amazing accomplishment, but because it's a fun example of how easy it is to connect physical objects to the Internet using the Pi.

On the other hand, it is /fun/.

Passenger planes have had the same thing too.

Random Hall (a dorm at MIT) has/had a `bathroom server' that did exactly that and also a `laundry server' that tells you whether the laundry machines are busy. The bathroom server used to be at http://bathroom.mit.edu (seemingly offline now) and the laundry server is at http://laundry.mit.edu

I don't know the current status of the bathroom server, but when I was living in Random, certain bathrooms would be taken offline on Jewish days of rest (since activating the door switch could be considered prohibited work). So it's possible that the server is offline today for Passover.

> activating the door switch could be considered prohibited work

Unless the operators meant it as a joke, this is absolutely ludicrous.

Not a joke. Some appliances have what's known as "Sabbath mode", because of the Jewish restriction on doing work on the Sabbath. From Wikipedia: "When an oven is in Shabbat mode, the standard six- or twelve-hour automatic shutoff is overridden, and all lights and displays (for example, a light that might go on when the door is opened) are disabled."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbath_mode

IANJ, but electronic switch = spark = fire = work, as I understand it. This is pretty common (along with removing light bulbs from refrigerators, which to me makes no sense unless you also disable the temperature sensor).

Does it also apply to solid state switches actuated by a capacitative touch sensor? I wonder why this or something of a similar nature isn't a solution to most of these issues.

Well, the decision to make electricity forbidden was a mix of building (by closing a circuit, not relevant to 100% capacitive systems), spark (ditto), heating and adding power consumption. There is some debate as to whether those last two still always apply to 100% capacitive devices (as this is important to Israeli soldiers and hospital workers).

But ultimately, most Rabbis know that these reasons have mainly been brought up to avoid making those "holy days" look like other days by allowing the use of computers, microwaves and so on, so it's not just going to go. Every practicing Jew has thought about it. Many hope our Rabbis change their mind one day, seeing how hard life without electricity has/will become and how plausible solutions may exist.

No, it wasn't meant as a joke. Exactly what activities are prohibited on days of rest is a matter of some debate [1], but the general attitude of the dorm tended to be that the bathroom server really wasn't that big a deal, so if anyone had a strong objection to it, then taking it offline (or disconnecting particular bathrooms) wasn't a problem.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activities_prohibited_on_Shabba...

It's also why East Campus had keys (which were great for giving non-residents) instead of the card entry system used on every other building (with keys not being distributed).

(41W)

Work during Passover is not prohibited, though.

My understanding is that work is prohibited on the seventh day of Passover.

The bathroom server was up until just a few weeks ago. I'll have to ask someone here what happened. (We've had the system for over ten years, I think, so some of the equipment is getting old. )

Erons and I (you'll probably not recognize me?) worked on the bathroom server about a year ago - I think the infrastructure is still in place, it might just need to be reconnected.

Laundry server sounds interesting. We just reprogrammed the logic board with a few switches on our laundry to make it free for those in the know and twice as much as the other floors for everyone else (keep the riff raff away). It was a small floor (suites) so all 24 of us on the floor (and a few friends from other floors) had access.

It was even more practical before the web server when you could just do:

finger @bathroom.mit.edu

(it was still active a few months ago, what's going on! :)

We desperately need the laundry one in my dorm at Oxford! I have invested way too many brain cycles in thinking about unobtrusive ways of achieving that.

A commercial laundry server product: http://www.laundryview.com/lvs.php

Which is used in a couple other MIT dorms.

Sounds like the real problem is that you don't have enough toilets.

We can hope the logs help to make the problem very concrete and easy to argument.

If you can push numbers about the maximum time someone has to wait before having access to a bathroom, the qualification of the problem could shift from "inconvenient" to a potential health problem.

My thoughts exactly. Kudos for geeking out on the problem, but that shouldn't be necessary.

On the other hand, building new bathrooms or expanding existing ones can be a long and expensive process, so improving the efficiency of existing resources can be a smart way to go.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to declare the bathrooms unisex, especially if you have a serious gender imbalance at work. I worked at a startup office that had a (typical) 80% male to female ratio, but the building was designed with two male and two female toilets.

These were the types of bathrooms that had a single toilet, a single seat, and a door for the whole thing, much like a bathroom in your home. Having such a bathroom be assigned to one gender only doesn't really make much sense, but it was especially apparent when there was frequently a line for the men's bathrooms while both womens were empty.

The video/gif on the article shows both men and women entering and exiting. There is only one LED. There is only one website. The diagram only shows three stalls. I venture to guess that this bathroom is already unisex.

All three cubicles are indeed unisex. (I used to work there.)

Especially in older buildings like the one MxM are based in...

http://s0.geograph.org.uk/geophotos/03/75/67/3756777_737cd93...

Yep. The company I work for built something exactly like this [1] when we were sharing two single stall bathrooms with a floor that, during the day, was occupied by somewhere around 40 people.

And then we moved to an office with multi-stall bathrooms and it wasn't necessary anymore.

[1] http://pee.mover.io -- still up because we gifted it to those left behind (though I don't know if it's still functional).

Yeah, this has only become a problem in the last few months where we've been growing the company. We don't really have the space to build new toilets, and soon we'll outgrow our beautiful office, partially for this reason. For now I think we're happy to wait occasionally for the loo. As another poster observed, this project was a fun way to improve the waiting experience and make the most of the facilities that we have.

Not an easily solved problem, though, to just up and install new toilets. The only thing you can do at this point is optimize for wait times.

Well, there's always this solution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_urine_collection_devic...

One of the developers at work put an Pi-sized device on one of the toilet stalls, with a page on heroku to show the status of the stall. It worked well, and yes, we do have too few toilets at work.. :(

Reminds me a bit of the Trojan Room Coffee Pot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot

Note that the HTCPCP protocol has recently been extended to fully handle teapots (instead of just returning an error) - https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7168 I think that adding toilets is a very reasonable next step.

So good.

Add a yellow light for when there are stalls available but all free stalls have recently been used for more than 2 minutes.

So basically, yellow would mean "You could, but unless you really need to, you probably don't want to" ;)

Or a yellow light to reserve a stall for the short walk to the bathroom from your desk. Nothing worse than making the B-line to the stall, only to have someone cut you to the chase.

You could make it very simple timer that holds the stall for a brief minute or two.

Oh I get it, you're saying that it would probably smell like shit in there. wink.

I don't know about you, but it always smells heavily of strawberries after I've been there.

This is actually immensely useful. Imagine I'm Disney, New York City or the National Parks Service.

This could tell me:

1. Which bathrooms are used and when?

2. Which bathrooms/stalls are being avoided by people?

3. Which bathrooms are out of toilet paper or paper towels?

Could literally save millions of dollars, improve location choices for bathrooms and have way fewer dirty bathrooms. It's the same point as those sensors in garbage bins/dumpsters.

Prone to race conditions, unfortunately. What's more frustrating than seeing Yes and then finding the door closing in front of you.

Maybe they could add a reservation queue to the bathroom as new functionality. That would probably be unnecessary blocking if people abandon their place in line.

Maybe the bathroom lock could literally be a mutex.

> Maybe they could add a reservation queue to the bathroom as new functionality.

The FIFO system does not take urgency into account. When making a query, it would be good to give an urgency rating on a scale of 0 to some_number.

Or try to predict availability based on recent queries. If there is only one stall open and someone checked its status 30s ago, respond that "maybe" a stall is free.

A queue would only work if everyone used this system. Unfortunately, you will always have visitors or people who don't want to participate.

Here are some more ideas for you to use the data

* What's the most common pattern for two occupied toilets (from the frequencies, it appears to be the classic occupied-free-occupied, to allow more space between users) * What's the day of the week that the toilets are most used? And less used? (it would also be nice to cross-reference that with the menus from nearby cafeterias) * Check if there's any correlation between the frequency of people going to the toilet and issues on you bug tracker. What about the average duration? * If you extend your system to a coffee machine, correlate the coffee consumption with the toilet's usage.

Actually, with this, you could use most of this data and train a decision tree with it. Then, you could warn your co-workers with "In 10 minutes it is expected that the toilets will be occupied, maybe you want to go now?".

On the other hand, maybe you just want to keep this functionality to yourself, otherwise everyone will just go to the bathroom 10 minutes earlier.

Loved this line:

For now we’ll keep collecting data to see what other worthless knowledge we can assimilate.

On one hand, we want to lighten up and acknowledge that not everything we do is to "save the world".

On the other hand, we shouldn't forget that some of our greatest achievements came from something that seemed worthless at one time.

I was totally expecting an article discussing the politics of toilets.

Seeing zero referenced arrays in the detailed data output warms my heart. Looks like no one likes the middle stall. At current employer, no one uses the first stall because the flush mechanism is partially broken and no one is motivated enough to figure out how to get it fixed. A maint dude could find this data useful to find problems requiring repair.

I will admit that looking at the headline I initially thought this was a geolocation app for urban bathrooms. To discourage the homeless most local retail establishments either supposedly don't have a bathroom or you need to explain to the front desk why you need a key and they need to think your appearance is adequate, or you need to buy something to be allowed entrance into the area at the back of which are the restrooms. This could be useful. Where I live and shop is 20 miles away in a much nicer area, but where I work, if you're out for a walk at lunch time, and you have to go, you pretty much have to use an alley just like the homeless, so an app like this to find the nearest free toilet (free as in don't need reservations and seating at the restaurant, or rented office space, etc) would be occasionally convenient.

The middle stall is the smallest ;)

While the hardware part of the job is nicely done, I think there still remains the problem of how to convey the information to the users.

Once a toilet becomes free, everybody waiting will try to aquire the ressource (ie: do a costly walk to the bathroom).

There must already be some gaming theory or performance modelling result that solves this issue, though.

Just a simple idea would be to add a random delay for propagating the information to different users.

One of my friends built software to track use of the two washers and two dryers at our local dormcubator. It relied on students to report that they had started a cycle by email; so long as students did this then the website could tell you when the cycle ended because the machines had fairly consistent cycle times.

While he built a virtual queue into the website (type in your email address and we'll send you an email when the last load is done) it turns out that people are really bad at picking up their laundry right when the machine finishes...

ThoughtBot did something similar with a Arduino. http://robots.thoughtbot.com/arduino-sensor-network

They had done a podcast episode as well on this although I can't remember which episode that was.

Does your office violate Osha standards for employees per toilet?

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2013-title29-vol5/xml/CFR-2...

Well, theirs doesn't: it falls outside the purview of OSHA via the loophole of not being in the US :-) In fact, the relevant UK legislation is marginally stricter, and permits up to 50 people at work for 3 unisex toilets: http://www.hse.gov.uk/contact/faqs/toilets.htm . That's five fewer than the US Labor Code.

I did note with amusement this line in the US code:

(2) Construction of toilet rooms. (i) Each water closet shall occupy a separate compartment with a door and walls or partitions between fixtures sufficiently high to assure privacy.

US toilets gave me quite a culture shock: the partitions and doors are so short, high off the floor, and full of gaps that they certainly did not "assure privacy", at least not compared to what I'm used to.

Shameless plug: A few co-workers and I hacked together the same thing not too long ago, using an Arduino: http://www.command-tab.com/2013/07/23/gottago/

Just give each stall its own Instant Messenger id so I can check their status via my client

That would be a privacy invasion, as users, by polling, could figure out who is on each stall, and, from there, how long everybody spends there. It also allows everybody to recreate the detailed log that this system logs.

I would be careful deploying even the original indicator because of concerns that it might break some employment/privacy law. It is hard to prevent systems from leaking personally identifiable information, especially in cases where data is grouped over a relatively small number of persons, as appears to be the case here.

I love projects that have a hardware and a software piece like this one does!

The features seem to have gone through a progression based on the hardware available.

The initial thing, a red/green light, could have been done entirely through simple logic built just with transistors and passives. The next iteration, a web-based yes/no, could have been satisfied with an Arduino and Wifi/Ethernet shield, or maybe an Electric Imp. The final phase, tracking duration by toilet, the menu bar helper, etc, requires either some backend infrastructure (if using an Arduino or Electric Imp) or the Raspberry Pi.

The animated header, giant video, and annoying spinning model almost lost me though.

Love it!

I made something very similar with a Spark Core (https://www.spark.io/), lots of wire, some paper clips, post-it notes and gaffer tape. I should really get round to writing that up. Same single purpose site design (albeit only on our Intranet) but it has mobile apps and desktop notifications. Time for a pull request.

I was inspired by http://www.frisnit.com/telemetry/. Seems like this is a pretty common problem. :)

I would even go as far as "booking toilet". Sometimes when you need to take #2 and you absolutely want privacy (because that's a multi-tenant restroom) and isolation, you can pay for the next toilet by "paying". How to pay? Could just be a drink, or say thank you aloud to your coworker. Something fun.

A little torn about this. Reading through the comments, and kind of agree that the project is an interesting representation of hacker culture, and certainly stimulating/ morale-boosting to work on...

But on the other hand, I'm just a little bit sad that some clearly intelligent people have put time toward this problem instead of pressing issues like hunger or violence or any other number of social problems that are present all over the Valley and the US, not to mention the rest of the world. Secondly, every time I read an article about "using the bathroom for 1 less minute will save in total X years of your life!" I think about Wall-E and how much I don't care for that level of efficiency.

Alright I'll get off my box, because I'm sure this was a harmless and fun post, but this was just an honest statement of what I thought. I wrote about this (i.e., and get up on the soapbox with a loudspeaker) much more in-depth in case anyone is curious (or thinks I'm crazy) FYI: https://medium.com/business-startup-development-and-more/64d...

Was the downvote because this opinion, expressed in a hopefully respectful way, was just… not welcome?

I hope the data that comes from the toilet is inaccessible to anyone until the end of the day.

Otherwise it would be easy to infer from real-time data how long a persons bathroom break is and maybe infer what they were doing in there, which, while obvious, I think people would be uncomfortable with others knowing.

"For now we’ll keep collecting data to see what other worthless knowledge we can assimilate."

I see what you did there.

I love these kinds of projects though. "Pointless" is only in the eye of the beholder, and if I worked there, I would probably find this pretty useful.

When I see projects like this, I always remember that that's how webcam was invented.

Great! But you need a status update that's more mobile I think. Because the status is quite likely to change when you (and all your colleagues) see the green light and head for the door ...

" ... thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing and making friends that people were previously forced to do while waiting for [the loo]." -Douglas Adams

I have no experience with hardware. Can someone give some suggestions on where to start if I wanted to do a simple side project like this to gain some experience? Thanks

I'd recommend that you not start with the rpi if you have zero experience.

If you're in the USA (edit: at a local RadioShack), you can buy an Arduino, a breadboard, wire, some resistors, switches, and LEDs for less than $60 -- the cost of a typical newly-released video game.

Take it home, read the online getting started guides, and start learning how to get basic circuits working.

Start reading http://hackaday.com/ to get an idea of what's possible. Bookmark projects that look interesting and proceed from there.

I find hackaday inspirational, but not informative enough for newbies.

In no particular order, I suggest:

Check out makezine.com.

Find a local makerspace[1]

Work through tutorials and references for beginners (great hands on electronics book [2], more in-depth info to augment an electronics tutorial [3], arduino [4])

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=makerspace

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Make-Electronics-Learning-Through-Disc...

[3] http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Electronics-Inventors-Third-...

[4] http://www.amazon.com/Arduino-Workshop-Hands--Introduction-P...

To add, as a software engineer that knows very little about hardware... the arduino is pretty bulletproof and also dynamic enough to handle very sloppily designed electrical work.

As others have said, Hack-a-Day is great for inspiration, and MAKE is great for beginners (although falls short once you gain more experience). MAKE has a bunch of great intro books to Arduino, etc. in both paper and eBook form I'd recommend checking out.

I'd recommend buying an Arduino and some basic parts and a breadboard to toy around with. The Arduino.cc Playground (Wiki) has some great resources for interesting projects. You could also buy a MAKE book and an accompanying kit, although the kits tend to be a bit overpriced.

If you're interested in a bit more thorough understanding of electronics, I would recommend checking out the Students Guide to the Art of Electronics. You can find a pdf floating around online and buy the book to support the author (who is an amazing teacher)! It runs through all the basics of analog and digital electronics while keeping it interesting and the math to a bare minimum.

We did something similar last year http://briiiiian.com/bathroom-f-graf/

It is easy to mock the OTT solution that has gone on here, however...

I had the pleasure of working with a deaf guy that would spend an inordinate amount of time in the loo. There was just the one loo.

45 minutes could pass by with him occupying the loo. Being deaf it wasn't as if you could knock on the door and ask him to hurry up - he would not be able to hear you, and, even if he could hear you he would be able to pretend otherwise. Like Schrodinger's cat there would be no way of knowing...

You couldn't complain either, for all one knew he might have been using that time for something more important than one's own toiletry needs. Perhaps it was the batteries in his hearing aids, not being deaf one would not know, or even know if speculating about such a thing was morally inconsistent. Or maybe he had another medical condition that one was not privy too. Or maybe his body jewellery needed to have puss and inflammation cleaned out if it on a regular basis. One can only imagine...

It wasn't as if he took the newspaper in or his phone, so it wasn't a really good book or jolly exciting porn collection that took up his time there. None of the micro-managers really thought it a problem that he would spend such a long time in the loo, even if other staff and visitors had to go to a nearby Starbucks due to being caught short.

So we had a 'is the toilet free' messaging system of our own. There would always be euphemisms, it wasn't as if we would message 'finally [x] has finished having a poo and you can now use the loo'. Anyone shoulder surfing our screens would not realise that that messaging conversation in the corner about 'that report being delivered', 'the printer having finished', 'those files uploaded' or 'desperate for that CSV file' was about the status of the loo. However, through such messages, those two floors away from the loo would be able to find out if it really would be possible for them to relieve themselves or not.

In our case, of a small team with inadequate toilet facilities, we really should have moved to a proper modern office with all of those Philips controls in the toilets to know what the occupancy situation is, whether the loo needs to be flushed, whether the water in the hand basin needed to flow and so on. But we were not going to do that. So we had our own system, a system that manager types were not privy to. It worked well for us and it was fun.

Had we gone a bit further, hooked up that free Raspberry Pi nobody knew what to do anything with and implemented something similar, I don't know how it would have panned out. Someone other than the loo-hogger would have been sacked for wasting company time and not prioritising their work, the politics of disability would have got ugly and it would not have happened. So, even though the solution of the Raspberry Pi is OTT, in getting it done and having fun doing it, I think that this team have got something out of it a lot more valuable than their 'Heath Robinson' toilet status indicator.

Personally I like the simple solution they have on older trains - a light that shows 'vacant' or 'occupied'. There is no internet to break down, there is no TCPIP settings to get wrong, just a lightbulb to change and a switch to keep clean. I am sure that for multiple stalls the series/parallel could be worked out for the switches without too much difficulty.

Tie the data in with people's lunch calendars and you can start forcasting peak toilet demand!

Your office is absolutely beautiful. I hope one day our company will inhabit a space that nice.

I wish I had the type of job that involved enough free time to do something like that.

reminds me of this: http://www.sanbornmediafactory.com/portfolio_pieces/bum/

design firms love to know when their toilets are free

It should have a gas alarm on it to at least add 10 minutes after a flush.

Could actually provide life saving information in fire situations

Wow.. How a simple random thought could build into something...

Free as in beer or free as in speech?

This website gave me motion sickness. If it's some art project, good on them. If they're trying to communicate information, -1.

That animated background header is making me very motion sick. Ugh.

Can we stop with the nitpicking meta bullshit on every freaking article, please? I don't care about the things you dislike about a random webpage. It wasn't submitted because of a header. In order to read the article that we're actually discussing, you have to scroll down to where you can't see it anymore. It's a 10-second-at-most mild irritation. I would understand if it was an epilepsy warning o something, but it's not.

The fact that these comments get made wouldn't be a problem, except that people, since they agree with the complaint (as I happen to do in this case) keep upvoting the damn things. At this point, there's a good 20% chance that any given comment thread is gonna start with the same boring arguments we've had four hundred thousand times on this site already that I have to scroll down past to talk about actual article we're discussing.

These kind of comments are cheap, effortless, and do nothing but degrade the quality of discussion and make participation a PITA for people who want to actually talk about the relevant article instead of random web design complaints.

This kind of "nitpicking meta bullshit" is valuable feedback to someone, like a startup, who might be marketing a product and hoping to not turn away customers. Sure, this particular thing isn't selling a product, but how many people would be turned away if it was?

Like you said: "this particular thing" isn't selling a product. "This particular thing" didn't ask for this feedback, doesn't need it, and may very well never see it. The fact that there are a few rare exceptions where this kind of discussion is helpful doesn't change the fact that, 90% of the time, it's a low-quality, useless waste of time.

Seriously. You have trouble reading the text? Select All, Copy, open your favorite text editor, Paste, read.

This place is called Hacker News, where "Hacker" is supposed to mean that it's a community of people who build interesting things, yet people can't even be bothered to take five seconds to take matters into their own hands when it comes to reading some text. We're power users. Act like it.

Similarly, on this meta side conversation, the 3D model of a simple box falls in the "because we can, not because we should" category. I scroll with the mouse wheel, and it was captured by that model viewer the moment it scrolled by.

Enjoyable article, though. Sounds like their solution and its optimistic locking may be susceptible to a race condition, however.

Everything beyond the red/green light falls into the "because we can, not because we should" category.

Does anybody really need a menu bar icon to show them the toilet status? Does this company or its employees benefit in any way from toilet occupancy statistics?

The hacker mindset is to do things just because they are possible. Efficiency and benefit are rarely as important as the pure joy of creating or doing things just because you can.

Ruthless efficiency comes into play once you are the owner of a company, but for the engineer the real joy comes from just making stuff.

Very true, and I have to admit that I have many side projects (with huge amounts of 'scope creep') that I've done just because I can.

I have a very hard time justifying that kind of behaviour on my employer's time though.

Yes.

Do we really need a 4MB animated GIF for this? The fact that they had to host it on Dropbox instead of their own site should have been a hint that it might be overkill.

I'm just wondering where Instagram comes into play. When I try to go back, it tries to go back to Instagram, which instantly puts me back at the site. Why?

That was used to host the picture of the Lego model, which is odd because other, larger, images were hosted on their S3 storage.

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