lucaspiller

If you don't need street-level geocoding, the GeoNames [0] project providers their data free of charge (attribution required). It provides city and district level data, which is suitable for tasks such as displaying the location name of photos or rental listings.

Self plug: I wrote a Node library a few years ago to use this data offline. It builds a SQLite database, which is small enough to be suitable for embedding into applications. [1]

[0] http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/readme.txt

[1] https://github.com/lucaspiller/offline-geocoder

Bobtrade | Full stack Engineer, Data Engineer Intern (paid) | London, UK | ONSITE INTERN

Bobtrade is an exciting startup which is going to revolutise the construction industry. We are changing an industry set in its ways and bringing it into the 21st century.

We are launching our first product, an e-commerce platform, at the end of the month. Our customers are incredibly passionate about our product, which is going to solve a big pain point in their industry.

We are currently looking to hire a number of candidates for paid data engineer internships. Basic knowledge of ML would be a bonus but not required.

We also want to expand our product team with another senior full stack engineer (React / Rails).

Email me directly for more details and to apply: luca@bobtrade.com

SEEKING WORK | Full stack Ruby on Rails and JavaScript developer with over 8 years experience

Location: London or remote

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucaspiller/

GitHub: https://github.com/lucaspiller/

Email: luca@blissfulsystems.com

I'm a full stack developer with over 8 years experience working with everything from startups to enterprise. My primary experience is with Ruby on Rails, doing frontend, backend and everything in between: from setting up new servers with Ansible, to tweaking some CSS. Recently I've been working more and more with frontend JavaScript, mostly TypeScript and React. I've had a lot of experience writing billing and booking platforms, and all the reporting and compliance tooling that goes with that.

Expert in: Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, TypeScript, React

Experience with: Erlang, Golang, Devops, Ansible, Docker, AWS

Like to learn more: Embedded programming with PlatformIO and C

I'm especially interested in working in the IoT or cryptocurrency space.

I run a small SaaS (aimed at businesses and professional freelancers) application which originally only had GitHub and Facebook authentication. I'm now only giving the option of email for new users, and will eventually remove GitHub and Facebook for all users. For my target demographic third-party authentication was really the wrong choice, but I can see how in some cases it could be useful.

Many other parts of the signup flow changed at the same time, so it's hard to measure the impact, but from my side it's much better having an email - I can find out what account someone has when they email me for support, and I can send them account notifications and marketing emails.

In one case I had a company email me, as they had forgot how to access their account. The user who emailed didn't have an account in the system, so I had to ask them to forward an email they were receiving from the application, and eventually found they had signed up with an old GitHub account for the company, that was no longer used (after this I added the account name to all emails I sent).

I'm also currently evaluating the best way to add PayPal as a lot of my traffic is from countries where credit cards aren't so popular. I currently use Stripe, but am trying to find a service to outsource all billing, to avoid having multiple payment provider implementations. I can see how customers could feel uneasy giving their credit card details to a random website, where as with PayPal you don't have that risk.

For anyone interested I created a privacy focussed theme for Hugo, with no third party scripts or assets:

https://github.com/lucaspiller/hugo-privacy-cactus-theme

I wanted a minimalist theme that's fast to load, but a lot of commonly cited examples are too extreme or look too dated for my liking. I wanted the same results, but something a bit more up to date and with code highlighting. You can see the end result on my blog (total network transfer 78kB):

http://www.stackednotion.com/blog/2016/07/09/setting-up-a-ne...

When you make an emergency call on a GSM network it specifially uses the tower which provides the best signal, which may be on a different carrier. In most countries you don’t even need a SIM card to make an emergency call.

My point is there is no technical reason why the emergency sevices couldn’t put up towers for 911 calls only.

Is there a name for this kind of architecture? Once I was daydreaming and thought something similar would work well for business CRUD applications. You get an audit log for free, and it would enable offline edits relatively easy.

It's fairly common in eastern and northern Europe too. In my building there is a single heat pipe from the city, however each unit has it's own meter for cold water, hot water (for taps) and hot water (for heating). The hot water meters are different in that the first measures the water flow, and the later measures the heat flow.

You can also buy clamp sensors that can be connected directly to a microcontroller (with an ADC - so not a Raspberry Pi without external hardware).

http://www.homautomation.org/2013/09/17/current-monitoring-w...

That’s no different than replacing parts on a car. You can pay Toyota to replace your brakes, or do it yourself. If you choose the later, then they fail, it’s not Toyota’s fault.

Be advised that Orange Pi have many different boards with similar names, but vastly different specs. The $6.99 model is for 256MB RAM and a Allwinner H2 chipset.

Also a lot of the boards can only be powered by a DC jack, not the onboard MicroUSB.

Typically when a lithium-ion battery is recycled some metal parts are extracted (the battery contains metal plates which are relatively easily separated), but the lithium usually is not as it’s a lot more complicated to extract. Economically it is a lot cheaper just to mine new lithium, so proper recycling facilities don’t often exist.

In the U.K. lithium-ion batteries are usually discarded in a landfill, and often treated as hazardous waste:

https://app.croneri.co.uk/feature-articles/dealing-waste-lit...

There are plenty of other good comments explaining why negative tariffs exist, but not many giving a solution.

In Europe a lot of residential heating is from electricity, so why not enable this on-demand when the electricity prices go low? Most countries have a cheaper night tarrif as traditionally electricity was cheaper as night, but that’s not really true any more. Often the heat energy is stored (e.g. in storage heaters or an insulated hot water tank) before use, so the energy can be buffered here.

Smart metering is one way to do this, but the basic technology to achieve this has existed for decades. In parts of the U.K. residential electric heating is often controlled by a radio signal [0] that is used to enable/disable the off-peak tariff, but is somewhat dynamically enabled based on the electricity demand.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_teleswitch

IUNGO is a blockchain based project to do exactly this:

https://medium.com/@iungo/iungo-global-wifi-networks-is-abou...

One of the big hurdles with OLED is avoiding “burn in” and image retention. For TVs it’s not so much of an issue (although even with my 2017 LG OLED I’ve experienced temporary image retention) as the picture changes often, but with a computer display that often shows static images (think menu bars), it’ll be really obvious when you go to watch a movie or play a game.

If you want to pass-through a consumer Nvidia card to a VM, you need to hide that you are running a VM from the guest OS, otherwise the Nvidia drivers will fail with some obscure errors.

https://github.com/sk1080/nvidia-kvm-patcher/blob/master/REA...

So why not take advantage of that... instead of passwords just email the user a link they need to press to login.

> That and the fact that there are still very few places accepting it.

This is one thing I don’t get. In countries like China and India (to name the two countries I know about) mobile payment apps are ubiquitous. You go in to a shop, scan a QR code, and boom your payment is done. This is what crytocurrencies promised, but instead more closed apps came to fill the market. What happened?

I often read comments here comparing our lives to hunter-gatherers, but something to bear in mind is most humans haven’t lived like that for many thousands of years. We may have evolved from that, but our bodies are very different to the people who lived like that. Farming has been around for a long time, and a lot of that involves doing the same repetive tasks all day long, and having a relatively stable supply of food.

Further to this, one of the main concerns for Lithuania (and other Baltic states) is energy independence from Russia. Ignalina made them a net-exporter of electricity, but now almost 70% of electricity is imported, mostly from Sweden. Gas and oil mostly comes from Russia, and all national gas companies in the Baltic states are largely owned by Russian companies.

As you say there is no reason for another plant to be built in the area now, but it'll also mean the Baltic states most likely end up purchasing electricity from Belarus. As they have strong political ties with Russia, that doesn't really help their case in becoming more independent.

It's available from the Microsoft Store in Europe, probably will take time until it's available from third party retailers as it was only released last month:

UK from £1499 https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/store/d/surface-book2/8MCPZJ...

DE from €1749 https://www.microsoft.com/de-de/store/d/surface-book-2/8mcpz...

As long as you don't mind being tied into the Apple ecosystem (and trust they won't loose your data) it's a good solution. Notes used to be backed by IMAP, but the new 'rich notes' since iOS 9/OS 10.11 is backed by iCloud.

Here in Europe it’s even worse, in my country the only streaming services are Netflix and a Russian-only equivalent (I don’t speak Russian). It’s no surprise that pirating content is so prevalent here, it’s not that people don’t want to pay (although it’s not really fair that the average wage being 4x less than the U.K., Netflix is more expensive here), it’s that they aren’t even given a choice. Most of the time I use a VPN to access U.K. streaming services.

> Once the monopoly is out, Uber will just be like every other taxi company. And better still, all the taxi companies will be like Uber.

That is pretty much how things are here in Lithuania. The system works well, you don't really come across drivers or cars with issues, and there isn't really any kind of monopoly. There aren't many true taxis, because being a 'taxi' vs a 'private driver' means you pay more effectively just to be able to drive in bus lanes.

Historically people would phone up to book (and a car would turn up in under 10 minutes), but now you can use a single app to book and pay by card with all the different taxi companies (and get whatever car is quickest or cheapest). Uber were late to the game when they entered the market in 2015, and their launch has gone pretty much unnoticed.

It's also indirectly their funding model. The bulk of Mozilla's revenue comes from search partnerships, who earn the bulk of their revenue from advertising.

I do the same (uBlock Origin) and almost every site works, but there are a still a few I need to whitelist because they do weird stuff, like triggering their own scripts to run from analytics callbacks. Airline and banking websites are a couple of common categories of sites I usually need to whitelist to work properly - that's not really an issue though as they don't usually have 3rd party ads.

My 2014 MBA has recently started saying this, but I haven’t noticed any sudden change in battery life, I still get 5-6 hours.

What's wrong with cheap handheld barcode scanners, like this for $17:

https://www.amazon.com/Barcode-Scanner-Symcode-Handheld-Read...

It just acts as a USB keyboard (no drivers needed), so you could easily hook it up to a Rasperry Pi to do what you want.

It goes both ways too. As a European I’d love to buy a Fiat(-Chrysler) 500e, but they aren’t sold here.

Although I’m for universal income, one of my concerns is how do you prevent companies from abusing it, and inflating prices even more.

Drugs and medical treatments in the US are already very expensive compared to the same in other countries. If everyone suddenly has an extra $1k/mo, why wouldn’t the drug companies increase their prices even more?

To me (as a European) it seems like a better option is universal healthcare, to at least make life critical medicine and treatments available to everyone, no matter their financial status.