henningpeters

> why on earth would you waste precious bytes on schema every time

cbor doesn't prescribe sending schema, in fact there is no schema, like json.

i just switched from protobuf to cbor because i needed better streaming support and find use it quite delightful. losing protobuf schema hurts a bit, but the amount of boilerplate code is actually less than what i had before with nanopb (embedded context). on top of it, i am saving approx. 20% in message size compared to protobuf bc i am using mostly arrays with fixed position parameters.

Nice write-up! Would love to read more about practical experience on sync engines. I am also currently building one for a niche use case: a CRDT based smart home system w/o central component: syncing config and state across several embedded/MCU + mobile via CAN bus and BLE, no Internet. It features a simple ORM and persistence and for dev/debug it runs on macos/Linux. Written in C++ and Dart. Due to memory and other platform constraints I chose to build most of it from scratch. Thought about open sourcing or writing about it, but wondered whether anybody cares given the relative obscure tech stack.

Doesn’t match my experience

Reminds me of a Sten I hired many years ago. He requested (and of course got) an hilariously exotic work setup and spent a ridiculous amount of time on its configuration. Right from the start he expressed his unhappiness with seemingly random office stuff: Every day, sometimes multiple times per day, he would would come to my desk and tell me what was wrong, implying I should fix it right now even though it wasn’t obvious that there was a problem in the first place. He also heavily criticized the code base while the same time wasn’t able to produce anything meaningful. For a couple of weeks we hoped his genius to appear and that we just have to give him more support and time to adjust.

Eventually, a group of female coworkers came forward and complained that he would make them feel uneasy. He would stand behind them watching silently what they were doing.

I don’t remember whether we gave him feedback for this or room to adapt, we’ve let him go the next day.

RiseML provides a higher-level abstraction than Kubeflow that is more similar to Google Cloud ML. I would love to get your feedback on our solution: https://riseml.com

Btw: we are currently preparing an open-source release

Disclaimer: I am co-founder at RiseML

> It's easy to envision a system utilizing a crypto currency and a digital wallet held by your browser that you fill occasionally and that prompts you to pay

Check out: https://satoshipay.io/

RiseML | Frontend/Backend/Distributed Systems | ONSITE Berlin | Fulltime | https://riseml.com/jobs

We build software for GPU-based deep learning clusters, on top of Kubernetes and DC/OS. Join our early-stage startup team in Berlin (VC-funded) and help us develop our command-line app (golang), web app (JS/react), API services (Python) and/or contribute to Kubernetes/Mesos open source projects.

Keywords: Python, golang, JavaScript/react, Kubernetes, Mesos

Email us at jobs@riseml.com

Having lived abroad for some time I can sympathize with the problems mindflayer and his girlfriend have. Health insurance is often a pain as a foreigner and immigrant, Germany doesn't seem to be an exception.

I looked a bit around and it seems that the OP didn't research all options (language barrier and bureaucracy is often a problem here).

@Mindflayer: I suggest you find an expert that can guide you through this jungle.

But what I found in my quick research is that there is a european health insurance card (apparently one can get it from one's EU health insurance in one's home country, it's called EHIC). It allows a German doctor to book services against your Italian health insurance. Unfortunately, it only covers emergencies.

For other medical services you are right, it's probably easiest if you have a job or are married. But it seems that there is another option: your girlfriend registers as unemployed/job seeking. Job seekers from EU countries are treated similarly as employees and hence are entitled to public health insurance.

Source: https://www.krankenkassen.de/meine-krankenkasse/krankenversi... (German)

I recently met the founders of https://www.daedalean.ai, it's more focused on personal aircraft than on big commercial planes though.

Ponzi scheme?

Great idea! This would be particularly useful for niche topics that don't have good meetup groups in all big cities. All the effort the organizers spend on finding high-quality speakers and attracting the right crowd could be multiplied. We have been thinking about running our Berlin NLP meetup (http://www.meetup.com/de-DE/Berlin-Language-Technology) more remotely, but the only thing we've done so far is posting videos of the talks online.

Meetup.com has been really great for us in getting attention for our _local_ meetup, but it isn't the right tool if you are running it non-locally/remotely. Sth. like meetup.com in terms of discoverability + a standardized tech infrastructure (sth. that "just works") for remote meetups is desperately needed.

Maybe it wasn't clear, but we open-sourced everything, including the trained model. See here:

https://github.com/spacy-io/sense2vec

For installation:

$ pip install -e git+git://github.com/spacy-io/sense2vec.git#egg=sense2vec

$ python -m sense2vec.download

This downloads and installs the sense2vec package and model we used in the demo.

We are currently working on finishing the PyPI package. Meanwhile only Linux is supported and the docs are pretty much non-existing. Also, please make sure you have a recent Blas/Atlas package installed (RedHat: atlas, atlas-devel)

Direct link to the model file (~600MB):

https://index.spacy.io/models/reddit_vectors-1.0.1/archive.g...

Try to search for Obama|PERSON

Accompanying blog post is at https://spacy.io/blog/sense2vec-with-spacy

Just a click away: rethinkdb https://github.com/bigchaindb/bigchaindb/blob/develop/setup....

This is pretty impressive work, hats off! Their extensive whitepaper is absolutely worth reading: https://www.bigchaindb.com/whitepaper/bigchaindb-whitepaper.... - its full of details of their solution and also has a good collection of background reading material.

What is important to note is that they don't address the Sybil attack on a technological level:

> Deploying BigchainDB in a federation with a high barrier of entry based on trust and reputation discourages the participants from performing an attack of the clones. The DNS system, for example, is living proof of an Internet-scale distributed federation. Appendix C describes how the DNS has successfully run a decentralized Internetscale database for decades.

As far as I understand with spending only little time on this matter that's the main tradeoff they took compared to fully decentralized databases such as the Bitcoin's public ledger and which allow them to scale the performance.

Demo was in RL, hence no link. Search for SS7/MSC attacks for more info.

> Hacking someone’s phone number is almost impossible to do, as someone would need to steal the physical SIM card or clone it at least. An almost impossible venture for the majority of fraudsters.

Wiretapping/redirecting SMS is actually surprisingly easy and doesn't require stealing/cloning SIM cards. Not sure how it compares to wiretapping unencrypted IP networks, but based on a demo I saw today I would guess it's easier.

Looks similar to what you can do with https://satoshipay.io, but they allow even tiniest Bitcoin payments (down to a single Satoshi) using sidechains.

Not surprising that s3fs is slower, it's implementation quality is not very high. Goofys looks much better on first sight. It would be nice if anybody could do a benchmark between goofys and riofs (without cache). But honestly, if you have some proper request handling there is not that much to tune. The biggest performance gains can be achieved from a good cache implementation and make such a system useful in a production environment, that's what riofs was written for.

Disclaimer: I initiated and supervised riofs.

exactly, so why do you need a flush then?

AWS S3 doesn't expose a flush()-like call in their API, hence what is the point of exposing something that the underlying service doesn't support?

Would be great to integrate it into a live regex editor such as http://www.regexr.com/

Why do you want to work at a startup?

great, will be there...

Skoobe, a new ebook subscription service based in Munich/Germany.

C and Python are in fact our most-used and loved languages.

We developed a cross-platform library in C that makes our codebase reusable across multiple platforms, currently we support iOS, Android, Linux and MacOSX. Next: maybe Windows/Windows Phone?

Most of our backend services and our web site are running on Python/Tornado. Additionally, we use Python a lot for infrastructure automation on AWS.

Btw: we are currently hiring in both areas, send me a mail in case you are interested: hp@skoobe.de

If you want to take a look at our app, go here: http://itunes.apple.com/de/app/skoobe-e-books-leihen-statt/i...

We are hiring a senior web developer for a well-funded Munich startup with interests in mobile applications and high quality standards. We develop code mostly in C, C++, ObjC, Python and Java. Our yet-to-launch product is a Spotify for ebooks. Get in touch with me for more details: henning.peters@skoobe.de or +49 89 / 2429267-13