alexandros

To be honest, with fleets in the wild, simple works. We do deploy containers to these devices, but rather than kubernetes-ing the whole thing, it's more like "every device in the fleet must run this container". In IoT/Edge affinity is a big deal, so the payloads are pretty uniform. You don't want your container to migrate away to another device while you're trying to use the device to e.g. fly a drone or open a lock.

The difficulty comes in configuration, where things are much more complex than the cloud, since every device is "special". Different customers, keys, settings of all sorts. So we allow individual environment variable settings for each device.

The real complexity is in ensuring you can reach every device as long as possible, and that the devices behave well when they can't reach the cloud. We set up a VPN to ensure the former, and have a pull-based architecture where the device is responsible for "catching up" to the fleet when it comes back online to handle the latter.

There's a bunch of other things we've solved, like container deltas to improve download times by something like 10-70 times (and reduce bandwidth costs) but honestly the biggest difficulty has been in integrating cloud/hardware/developer/network/OS etc seamlessly, so people can succeed at building fleets, and fast. It's like there's 10,000 papercuts moreso than one or two big problems to solve. It's a long chain of things that all have to work right to make the system work, and each one has to be done in a way so that it doesn't break after some time passes (see the OP for an example).

To answer your last question with (yet another) plug, you can probably run through our getting started guide in an hour and have your first device that you can deploy a js project to pretty fast. If you spend a few days, you can start to have some real accomplishments. It's not that hard to make the jump these days if you have a web background (hell, most of the founders didn't have IoT experience when we started) but there are things you need to learn that relate to hardware and linux if you want to do something more advanced. You can learn at your pace though, and I thoroughly recommend starting with a project you enjoy, something like, but not necessarily https://www.balena.io/blog/make-a-web-frame-with-raspberry-p...

Device fleets are incredibly hard to get right, and if you have no updateability, you have to nail them the first time. For someone coming from a cloud background, it's a jungle out there, where all sorts of "easy" or "solved" problems are nothing of the sort.

As a sort of PSA, I want to plug the work that we have done at balena.io (formerly known as resin.io) to solve problems like these for everyone deploying Linux IoT devices, including open source / non-paying users.

We've built the open source balenaOS[1] and the (newly) open sourced openBalena[2][3] management server that anyone can use without paying us a penny. If you're about to manufacture a fleet of linux devices, and are about to put them out there, and don't want to pay for a service (so you're not using balenaCloud) but also don't want to solve problems we've spent years already finetuning, (such as ntp, dns, cellular modem support, read-only filesystem, host updates, etc etc) use the above projects and save yourself a mountain of pain in the ensuing years.

I hate being alarmist, but working with device fleets over the last 7 years, I've seen things you wouldn't believe. I've seen devices catch on fire, drown in storms, launch DDoS attacks, and everything in between. It's incredibly hard to underestimate how bad things can get when you put your devices out there with no ability to find them and update them if push comes to shove.

[1] balenaOS: https://www.balena.io/os/ [2] openBalena: https://www.balena.io/open/ [3] openBalena github: https://github.com/balena-io/open-balena

A Greek saying goes: Ουδέν μονιμότερον του προσωρινού. (There is nothing more permanent than the temporary)

I keep thinking about it when building out information system architectures, especially ones that interface with end users. Bad design is metastatic and unbelievably hard to get out of. Whatever the cost of reversing a bad design decision you have in mind, 10x it and you still might not be truly there.

Acquisitions are all well and good, but unfortunately, when an asteroid hits you, all the umbrellas in the world won't help. Tesla has been attacking the hard problems (like battery cost) for close to a decade while most others kept busy making fun of them.

When you see Tesla causing drops to the tune of 15% or even 20% to the sales of premium ICE car brands, and who knows how much more it will be in the next quarters, a hit this big and this sudden can be quite destabilizing to a company with a highly optimized supply chain. Also, these companies haven't delivered something truly new in decades, and to do so now, under the gun, would require not a product revamp, but a culture revamp. Never heard one of those being pulled off.

Innovation is hard, let's ask for government assistance: https://www.reuters.com/article/autoshow-paris-electric-sque...

I would like to go on the record as saying that the big car companies of today, short of a miracle, are on track to meet the big mobile phone companies of the pre-iPhone era. Remember when Blackberry, Nokia, Motorola, Alcatel, Sony seemed unassailable?

Wait times in the US for the existing models are already low enough that there's basically no backlog. (out of the 420k reservations they had at some point, you can think of it as half those reservations being overseas -- not yet tapped, and of the remaining 210k half or likely more of those are for the 35k version. They've already shipped 91k cars, pretty much only to the US and Canada, so the US/Canada backlog for reservations is mostly new reservations. Also, they don't yet offer a leasing option, which is how most people like to buy cars these days.

Either the demand will die down REALLY soon, or not at all. Having seen the effect of someone I know test driving a tesla with no intent to buy, and then complaining about how intensely bad "regular" cars have felt for her since then, if anything sales will grow as more cars are distributed and people's immediate family and friends get to experience the car. In other news, 40% of Europeans said in a recent Ipsos Mori survey that their next car will be electric.[1]

In other words, I wouldn't hold my breath that this is going to die down any time soon.

[disclaimer: I am a big fat tesla fanboy (if it wasn't obvious) and have bought stock in the company, but I hope I am making the case with logic and data and can be convinced otherwise. That said, my phone background image looks like this: https://i.redd.it/lx9635tjoyf01.jpg]

[1]:https://www.treehugger.com/cars/europe-40-drivers-say-next-c...

Faulty != approximate. for all reasonable estimations of the Canada deliveries number, the title still stands.

Ok, so this is an article referring to some other reporting, which was somehow sourced itself. Suffice to say that factoid should come with significant uncertainty attached.

Went back to the sources, and it seems you're right on the Thiel thing. He did make peace with Thiel and Levchin pretty fast though, and even invested more money into paypal after he was kicked out (citation: the Ashley Vance book on Elon) which was my main point -- he didn't blow shit up or incite a rebelion, he just stayed on the sidelines and supported the team like a trooper.

I follow this stuff pretty closely and I haven't seen any mention of him making a stand and saying he'd never settle. All I've seen is an article referring to "sources" that said he or his team rejected a specific settlement. Can you point me to your source for the claim that he'd never settle?

Research what he did when he was fired as CEO of PayPal. He made sure the company had good management by making sure Peter Thiel came back (even though they weren't the best of friends at the time), and he stayed quiet, allowing the team to execute and make him rich. Now that you know this, will you update your beliefs about his ego?

you never know, the expanded board might actually be suicidal and choose to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. I don't think they're that deranged, but you never know.

Try to start a democratic company (or run a thought experiment about doing so) and you will probably find the reasons why democracy works better as a way to manage a society than a single company.

Hey there -- resin.io founder here.

While you are correct that we have not completed our open sourcing promise on time, and that is our fault, we have (and continue) to release as open source a lot more of our software than we "have to" because of the GPL. If you look at our github orgs, there are hundreds of projects, including the entirety of our operating system, and we did not have to release any of that.

We are taking a long time to release the open source version though, it's hard to deny. If it helps our case at all, this is because we're trying to do this in a way that allows us to make the eventual open source offering a first-class citizen of the ecosystem, receiving updates at the same time as our online service, out of the same repos, which is a non-trivial development workflow issue.

The latest version of resinOS even allows devices to de-provision from our cloud and re-provision onto an open source server (and vice versa). But of course the use of that won't be apparent until an open source server exists.

Do you really think everyone of the 325 million will be a recipient of the $10k income, or perhaps only the ones that earn the least? Is this a proposal any sane advocate of UBI has put forward, or are you perhaps strawmanning a slight bit?

I am not necessarily in agreement with everything UBI related, but adding noise to the conversation isn't going to get us to any insights any quicker.

Yeah! I don't approve what he's doing with his money either! We should take it from him and give it to others we like better! What could go wrong?

/s

At least it's a tech industry-only phenomenon right? In all the other industries, people are rational data analyzers with no bias whatsoever. If there's an epitomy of the tech industry, it's blaming ourselves for being uniquely bad at things we're actually better at than most.

Resin.io | Data / Software / Finance Engineer | REMOTE | FULL-TIME | https://resin.io

Resin.io is solving the myriad problems that come up when developers trying to manage software on thousands of intelligent devices in edge computing/iot/embedded scenarios. Our customers are working on everything from self-driving trucks to drones to sea turtles with cameras on them to smart buildings and smart everything else. We've pioneered bringing linux containers to ARM devices, and have built a complete solution around that, including an OS, cloud services, a beautiful UX, and of course, etcher.io.

We are looking for a person with a solid combination of Data, Finance, and Software engineering skills to work directly with the founders on building an end-to-end data & forecasting model for the whole company, tying together product metrics, financial data, revenues and expenditures, as well as team data & metrics. The resulting model should give high-level visibility into any problem areas and allow highly accurate scenario forecasting into the future.

If that sounds like a project you'd love to dive into, you're detail-oriented and believe that everything is systems all the way down, drop us a line at join4data@resin.io with a CV and a story of how you used data and/or code to solve a problem people wouldn't expect can be solved that way.

hey there -- resin.io founder here.

We built balena after running docker for millions of hours on resinOS devices. Turns out, containers are not just a good, but probably the best way to manage software on embedded linux devices. The whole "edge computing" wave that's started moving now is based on the idea of deploying containerised workloads to these devices. What we found though, is that Docker tends to have several subtle biases towards cloud usage that become apparent in the embedded context. So we made Balena to embed our improvements into Docker.

I can talk about this stuff for hours, but suffice to say we have customers doing building automation, smart retail, digital signage, industrial automation, automotive, etc. My current favourite though is the guys that put devices on the back of sea turtles in the galapagos. Check this footage out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfkfLsgEN9Q

Edited to add: On the hardware question, resinOS works on many many device types including niche industrial boards and well-known maker SBCs. We've made it relatively easy to port to new devices so we can keep expanding our supported types of devices. In the meantime, we're working on our own "industrial" raspberry pi variant, which, based on our experience so far, should be good enough for 60-80% of serious use cases. https://resin.io/blog/introducing-project-fin-a-board-for-fl...

Google reader was introduced, made it look like it would be there forever and cost nothing, which killed any alternatives. Then Google killed reader in favor of Google+. At that point, there was no good reader, and even with not-as-good alternatives like feedly, a lot of people didn't feel like setting things up again. As a result, the whole ecosystem was knocked out of balance and never recovered.

Arguably, that milestone hasn't been reached for rideshare apps in general, even ones that use real drivers!

I don't know about you, but the existence of Uber has increased my quality of life. Also, just the decrease in drunk-driving accidents that easy access to rides has brought about is worth a lot. It's easy to see the value Uber has added, and these are just a few easy points. There's a lot more.

...because organizing a hostile takeover, paying for the contract terminations, ripping out all the copper, cleaning it and gathering it all up in a form that can be delivered to a copper refiner, and finally shuttering the business and tying all loose ends is actually free, and in fact will somehow magically pay you not only the missing 20% of the price you paid, but an additional 20-60% you need to justify your trouble.

Lots of people confirming this on Twitter[1], and we're also seeing it at resin.io

[1]: https://twitter.com/AlecSanger/status/908402829349572608

I guess we're ruling out that GE might not have done a great job building a sw platform, and moving straight to "it can't be done, nobody can do it".

(Disclaimer: founder of horizontal IIoT startup, scaling just fine)

Dodged a bullet there. I just cannot see how Immelt, whose claim to fame is putting billions into GE Digital (search for previous HN conversations of GE's software efforts for if you want to laugh/cry) would have been any use to a young company fighting in a hyper-competitive space, where the outcomes range from "world domination" and "collapse into nothingness". Immelt's track record is working within a large, established bureaucracy, and maybe keeping things from completely falling apart.

If only it was so easy in real life to cleanly figure out who "starts out with less". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

In fact, the incredible Scott Alexander has also explained the point you raise in "Beware Isolated Demands For Rigor" [1].

[1]: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands...

Couldn't finish this. It started off badly by calling the hyperloop "vacuum-powered". First, it's not even vacuum sealed (just low air pressure), and second, how can something even be powered by the vacuum? Are we just throwing terms around for effect here?

Then, the author continues with more material errors. The hyperloop/tunnel combo apparently "requires a hard reboot" of the modern city. No it does not. The whole point is that it is tunnels underneath the modern city.

Finally, it starts mentioning ambitious projects that didn't work, such as the Concorde. Yes, people have tried things that failed before. And then it talks about putting more money into Amtrak, when Musk's prime concern has been how slow and expensive the high-speed rail project in CA has been, precisely because of how hard it is to get land rights. Getting around existing commitments of surface land is the whole point of tunelling!

As far as I was able to read, not a single mention that Musk has been able to take two or three other previously considered impossible tasks and bring them to completion. Call me a fanboy if you will, but at least my fanboyism is evidence-based.

It seems the author's point is "Let's never fund anything else speculative ever again". What's that network you're using to blast this tripe straight to my eyeballs right now? The inter-what? Who ever funded that waste of money? Why didn't they just fund the post office a little more?

The fact that we've lost faith in humanity's ability to improve things by taking on large, ambitious projects, even if some, even if most, will fail, saddens me every day. It doesn't prevent me from trying to make the world a better place though, and I hope nobody else was discouraged by low-quality, knee-jerk thinking like this, either.

To go one step further, who says inventing a better currency shouldn't be worth 3x as much as creating e.g. walmart or microsoft? Sounds exactly like the sort of civilisational step forward that should be rewarded handily. Remember, we're talking about a world in which bitcoin has absorbed 50% of the world's assets, presumably because it's better in some real way than other currencies.