HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

cambo

24 karma · joined June 20, 2014

submissionscomments
cambo··on Payment systems while working at a pizza place
I worked on/around Pulse (the POS system), Pizza tracker (GPS), Order screen, and other backend systems in the largest Non-US market for a few years. Other than Pulse, most of the instore software appears to have been market specific. The managers didn't have person specific data, but the Franchisee and Headoffice does -at least in my market. Also Tracker data was used for awards at the end of the year at Rally by the head office (best avg delivery time, most deliveries, highest reviews, etc - again this was out of the GPS system). The in store tracking data was never clean enough to profile employees in our market as the instore people were trained to move and cover others during a crunch. (to the extent that in our market we didnt' track instore stations that often)

In my time at a national Dominos HQ (several years), we were told Pulse was being re-written but it never arrived. It was managed by the US HQ, and all the international franchises (Each country is a franchise, that then subfranchises) were required to license it -we assumed it was calling sales #'s home to validate franchisee payments. The POS system has to handle an enormous db of combos/deals/sizes and then filter by available ingredients, national sales, buy one get one, franchisee overrides, which was then patched to have overrides that match the online ordering every hour. (eg. national large peperoni sale, limited by franchisee to just buy two get one deal, only off peak, on tuesdays, when sales are slow). Oh and it has to run on comodity hardware that the franchisee paid for 5 years ago and is too cheap to replace.

The fun logic was in profiling stores and making predictions about ingredients requirements.

cambo··on Ask HN: What are some of the best documentaries you've seen?
"A Walk to Beautiful" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Walk_to_Beautiful - Story of post pregnancy medical care for the women of Ethiopia who thanks to famine are too small to healthily have babies, and the stigma of the conditions they endure.
cambo··on Microrobots can brush and floss teeth in a proof-of-concept study
It's a quote from Farscape... unlike other shows, they were _very_ intouch bathroom habits in space. ;)
cambo··on Microrobots can brush and floss teeth in a proof-of-concept study
"What ever you do, _never_ swallow the Dentic"
cambo··on Apple's feedback mechanism is broken
For all the hate Microsoft gets, this is one area where they've got it right.

Microsoft's dev support framework, while not directly interacting with MS engineers (usually), the community of MVPs, Regional Directors, and even now the occasional Dev note in the opensource work MS is doing on github, has lead to a great ecosystem of support. This trickles down to Stackoverflow, the old Alt.Net crowd (and the associated .NET user groups that still persist), and the MS dev blog'o'sphere mean this type of issue is much rarer.

*edit: oh and I forgot the UserVoice pages, where the community can vote on issues, and they'll get assessed by the product teams.

cambo··on Casting Silver Bullets (2013)
This was the hobby project of Patricia Briggs' Husband Michael, who sadly passed a few years ago.
cambo··on Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC
Jeff Gerrling goes over why they changed... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUamq0ey8_M&ab_channel=JeffG...
cambo··on Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC
Why isn't it just a CM plugged into the bottom of the keyboard circuit board for upgradability... it doesn't bode well that Rasberry Pi's own products aren't using the weird connecter the CM has.
cambo··on Videogrep: Automatic Supercuts with Python
I'm assuming you meant this article at ars http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/with-30-tuners-and-30...