bjpirt

I'm sad that it didn't work out, but kudos to you for doing this. Behaving decently feels like it's becoming an increasingly rare attribute of doing business these days.

I'm curious if you feel it could have worked out differently if you'd flipped the approach on its head and instead of starting with investment and then the product, you bootstrapped custom radios and built the platform out from there when you had some traction?

I ask partially because I'm in a similar place at the moment with a product (http://mirobot.io) and considering different growth strategies.

Maybe it should be 2002 words, if a picture is worth 1000 words.

I hadn't realised that the barge was called "Just Read The Instructions" and it's just brightened up my day to see life imitating art like this. The names of the spaceships in Iain M. Banks' Culture series is one of my favourite little details in those books.

Great name - nice Asimov reference

That's a good professional resignation letter - keep those bridges unburnt and leave on a positive note.

This might be of interest for getting rid of that command prompt window:

https://discourse.syncthing.net/t/keeping-syncthing-running-...

I only had about 2 of my roughly 500 pledges that didn't go through when it came to the time to collect the cash.

Cassandra is very good at storing ordered sets of data which you can then pull out the nearest value to a key. There are a load of layers on top of this that are more specifically time-series which it probably makes sense to use rather than building your own:

- https://code.google.com/p/kairosdb/

- https://github.com/OpenNMS/newts

- https://github.com/rackerlabs/blueflood

- https://github.com/pyr/cyanite

I found this a frank and pretty fascinating inside view of how hackers operate in the wild.

Thanks to whoever it was for publishing it. It's a must-read for anyone running any kind of IT services. Well worth running through these steps on your own systems.

It makes me very happy to hear this. I've always been sad that the initial promise of Pachube being an open place to store and exchange data was subsumed by corporate overlords.

This is as close to the mindset of the original Pachube as I've seen in a long while.

Nice work!

Thanks for the link - I've used OpenSCAD previously and enjoyed how easy it was to do parametric modelling but grew frustrated with its interface and a bunch of other annoyances. I'd been wondering about making an online version that uses a real language but it's nice to see someone has beaten me to it.

I think the node one is

http://cylonjs.com/

All are pretty great, and I'm looking forward to adding support for Mirobot (http://mirobot.io)

Thank you! It's what really got to me about existing robots for schools - they don't give you any insight as to how they work.

Hopefully this one will...

When I first read this headline I just assumed he'd had a child.

Low paying: check

Early morning: check

Exertion requiring: check

Not that it's not extremely worth it of course.

Try Gandi:

http://wiki.gandi.net/en/contacts/login/2-factor-activation

(note to self: activate 2FA)

I love these cheap linux modules that keep on springing up. I was just wondering whether DPTechnics actually designed and built this themselves or just ordered a bunch in from China - it looks identical to this module I found on Alibaba:

http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/705656079/3g_gps_wifi_modu...

This is a great article, and although it may raise the ire of some of the REST purists out there, I completely agree with the pragmatic approach. It prompted me to finally publish some of my thoughts on API design that complement the more technical ones in the article:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5831253

Fantastic project! My wife and I spent the day making rings for each other here:

http://www.weddingringworkshop.co.uk/cms.php?pageid=2

which is highly recommended, but sadly we didn't have the option to add an inductively powered LED lighting element to them :-)

The statuspage.io link on that meta page is broken btw - the : is missing from the url.

Edit: really like the service - considering using it for our status page

Location: London, UK

We're hiring at Cosm (http://cosm.com) - we're a service for getting devices onto the Internet of Things

We're looking for good developers (Ruby, but other languages are always interesting) and have an excellent engineering culture where you get to play with lots of real traffic and interesting technologies.

Take a look at https://cosm.com/jobs for more details

I'd been meaning to publish this post on doing a similar thing with Backbone and Node.js. Now seems as good a time as any...

http://pirt.co.uk/post/25095198148/hybrid-sql-nosql

Good news, although it saddens me a bit that this should _be_ news

I hadn't even considered that it wasn't at a 1.0.0 release yet! Aside from version numbers being a bit meaningless, Nginx has been an absolutely rock-solid workhorse for me for about the last 5 years.

One of my favourite pieces of software, and the things you can do with Lua as a module make it an extremely flexible intelligent proxying service.

London, UK

Pachube (http://www.pachube.com) is looking for an experienced javascript / front-end developer to build some awesome widgets to display live data coming in to our system form thousands of connected devices.

See http://community.pachube.com/jobs/fd1009

Great place to work - excellent team and some good meaty problems to get your teeth into!

As a mac user I'd say that I'm more productive using Mac OS X, but that's not to say I wouldn't work somewhere that used Linux.

We have this identical issue and what works very well for us is to use local virtual machines (we use VMWare) because then we can use exactly the same configuration, independent of the development platform. For example, we have Mac and Linux users, but could also easily accommodate Windows users as well. Other benefits include the fact that you can really lock down the VMs to be exactly as production, whereas it's unlikely that a local dev machine would be the same (Does your production machine have Firefox installed?)

Another benefit is that when we change the configuration of production (which is all managed with Puppet) we can just update the dev machines because they were built with Puppet as well, without worrying about screwing up someone's desktop machine.

Plus, you can take snapshots... You can rebuild them easily... etc

Lots of benefits.

I'm a big fan of RabbitMQ ( http://www.rabbitmq.com ). It's an AMQP message queue and has a bunch of very nice features like:

- Persistent queues

- Clustering - Topic based queues for an extremely flexible syndication model

- Transactional (acknowledged) queues

- Lots of adapters in different languages

- Fast, handles thousands of messages/sec

It's written in erlang so if you're already running CouchDB then you can maximise any language specific knowledge.

Replicated queues are tricky to set up with any queuing system, but if you're looking to a) not lose any messages and b) have high availability then the simplest thing is just to run 2 independent but identically configured queues in parallel which are configured to be persistent and configure the workers to pull jobs of each queue in turn. If one of them goes down you can restart it and recover the lost jobs whilst the other queue continues.

Alternatively you can write to both queues and deduplicate the messages when you pull them off. Beetle ( http://xing.github.com/beetle/ ) takes this approach and uses Redis to manage the deduplication.

Works well for me - we then sync our password file between us using Dropbox. It creates a lock file that also syncs and stops multiple people from editing simulaneously and messing things up.

And even now there's no way of manually expiring a cached page without using a third party unsupported plugin (IIRC)

I still love Nginx though :-)