274 karma · joined June 27, 2012
Sure, I would rather deal with an outage during business hours, but that means that many of my Customers are also dealing with an outage. If the outage were at 4 AM, most of my Customers would be asleep, and wouldn't even notice the outage.
For example, 6 PM on Saturday PDT is 1 AM on Sunday GMT and 9 AM on Saturday in Hong Kong. This would almost certainly be a time of lower deployments / requests globally.
Every SaaS product I've built has analyzed traffic, and performed migrations/deployments at off-hours (generally, after midnight in our dominant time zone). In this case, the outage may have resulted in hundreds (thousands?) of paged administrators across the world, but at least fewer end-users would have been affected.
Also, at scale, it's a good idea to deploy to a single cluster/zone first, and check error rates before deploying to the larger environment.
It's pretty scary that the 'professionals' to whom I've trusted my business aren't more savvy when it comes to high availability...
Every SaaS product I've built has analyzed traffic, and performed migrations/deployments at off-hours (generally, after midnight in our dominant time zone). In this case, the outage may have resulted in hundreds (thousands?) of paged administrators across the world, but at least fewer end-users would have been affected.
Also, at scale, it's a good idea to deploy to a single cluster/zone first, and check error rates before deploying to the larger environment.
It's pretty scary that the 'professionals' to whom I've trusted my business aren't more savvy when it comes to high availability...
Despite the negative press recently, Laundry and Dry Cleaning really are problems that would benefit from today's technical prowess. Modernizing laundry has real environmental benefits to water usage, not to mention the convenience factor of a delivery service. As humanity becomes more and more urban and less and less likely to have space for a personal washer and dryer, demand for efficient laundry service is growing.
Rinse needs to tackle interesting technical challenges as well. Of course, the routing problem as popularized by the Traveling Salesman Problem (except with multiple, load-balanced agents) is a challenge, but since we are also taking photos of the clothes we process, there are interesting data mining, machine learning, and image processing applications as well. This is in addition to the joys of rapidly scaling an operational system, while continually optimizing a consumer-facing product.
We're looking for skilled developers of all types to join us. Since we haven't taken any VC yet, this is a chance to earn a significant equity stake (while still earning a competitive salary). We're a Python/Django/Heroku/AWS/PostGIS/Backbone/Sass shop currently, but since we're small, there are opportunities to steer us technically as well.
More information at https://www.rinse.com/careers/ or just contact us at jobs@rinse.com
I'd be very curious to see how this process differs from the high-power lighting LED manufacturing process (e.g. CREE), which is a more modern technology by several decades. I would guess there is much more of the automation people are expecting...
This build-test-debug loop costs millions and may take months or years, and a single spectacular failure can sink the entire project (e.g. DC-X).
Most engineering is not like software! For example, most of the cost of a bridge is not the civil engineering to design the structure...
Luckily, my neighbor ran an open wifi hotspot, so we just used that for a few weeks. Sure, it was a spotty connection, but it did let us keep up on email.
I'm paying it forward by running an unencrypted 'guest' SSID, isolated (VLAN) from my encrypted SSID. Many consumer-grade wifi routers support this setup, and I can't see any reasonable excuse not to do this as a courtesy to visitors and neighbors.
This oscillation in northern Pacific sea surface temperatures has a frequency of 30-50 years, so we'll probably be in the cool/dry phase for some time.
However, given the variable nature of climate and a host of other oscillations and trends that are occurring at the same time, it's irresponsible to forecast "extreme drought for at least the next decade" based on this single signal. For example, forecasters are predicting El Niño this fall, which is a (generally) stronger signal than the PDO, and is statistically associated with wetter weather in California.
You're definitely correct in worrying about the water situation in California, though. Population pressures, groundwater depletion, and climate effects all point to significant water resource pressure for the state in the foreseeable future. This will translate into higher food prices, as farming is a major use of water in the state.
I think the Maker Faire is that weekend, about 20 minutes south of SF in San Mateo, if that kind of hacking is your thing.
Rinse is a fast-growing Technology-Enabled Dry Cleaning and Laundry Delivery Service based in the design district in San Francisco. This is a chance to join a 'rocket ship' startup pre-venture capital. We're currently hiring people of all types:
* We'd like to hire Software Developers of all stripes to join our small team and build mobile apps for our customers and drivers, sophisticated internal processing tools, and a robust and polished customer-facing web presence to further burnish our brand. Our stack is built on Django, with a healthy amount of HTML5 and Backbone.js, but we're more interested in hiring someone with mature development practices, mentorship experience, and strong analytical capability. Knowledge of any new tools will come easily to the right person. A job description is at https://rinse-cdn.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/docs/Rinse%20-%20D...
* As this is an operationally-focused business, we're also looking for a 'Swiss-Army Knife' generalist to join our high-caliber team and own whatever parts of our operations, marketing, or social media need attention on a given day. This is a chance for a smart person to join a tech startup in a critical role, even if that person isn't a software developer.
* We're also looking to hire a Director of Marketing to help us accelerate growth as we optimize our operations. With a great domain, solid product, tech-savvy customer base, and growing ad presence, this is a great opportunity for a consumer-focused marketing professional. A job description is at https://rinse-cdn.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/docs/Rinse%20-%20D...
* Last but definitely not least, we're hiring individuals with a clean driving record for part-time evening work delivering and picking-up laundry and dry cleaning as a Rinse Valet. This is a great way for students and the under-employed to pick up some extra cash a couple of nights a week. Apply via this web link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1kWZYu1kg1r8kxdDC9ObKdgQP_1N...
Interested? Email jobs@rinse.com for more information.
Since the employer doesn't need to offer benefits (the most expensive of which is health insurance) to part-time workers, it's very common to give them 29 or 27 hours per week.
Contrast this with the salaried worker, who is measured by work product, and may work 60 hours per week to justify the salary.
Rinse is a fast-growing Technology-Enabled Dry Cleaning and Laundry Delivery Service based in the design district in San Francisco. This is a chance to join a 'rocket ship' startup pre-venture capital. We're currently hiring people of all types:
* We'd like to hire a Senior Software Developer to join our small team and build mobile apps for our customers and drivers, sophisticated internal processing tools, and a robust and polished customer-facing web presence to further burnish our brand. Our stack is built on Django, with a healthy amount of HTML5 and Backbone.js, but we're more interested in hiring someone with mature development practices, mentorship experience, and strong analytical capability. Knowledge of any new tools will come easily to the right person.
* As this is an operationally-focused business, we're also looking for a 'Swiss-Army Knife' generalist to join our high-caliber team and own whatever parts of our operations, marketing, or social media need attention on a given day. This is a chance for a smart person to join a tech startup in a critical role, even if that person isn't a software developer.
* We're also looking to hire a Director of Marketing to help us accelerate growth as we optimize our operations. With a great domain, solid product, tech-savvy customer base, and growing ad presence, this is a great opportunity for a consumer-focused marketing professional. A job description is at https://rinse-cdn.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/docs/Rinse%20-%20D...
* Last but definitely not least, we're hiring individuals with a clean driving record for part-time evening work delivering and picking-up laundry and dry cleaning as a Rinse Valet. This is a great way for students to pick up some extra cash a couple of nights a week. Apply via https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1kWZYu1kg1r8kxdDC9ObKdgQP_1N...
Interested? Email jobs@rinse.com for more information.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/data_mine_1/2013/06...
One of the laws in question:
[1] http://news.yahoo.com/former-us-president-carter-uses-snail-...
If you want to tour one of the big companies, find a friend/acquaintance/recruiter, and catch lunch. These companies compete on quality of meals...
Also, if you're going to rent a car, I highly recommend visiting some Redwoods. The best around are in Big Basin about an hour south of SV. There are also some just north of SF in Muir Woods.
Rinse is a very early-stage startup (we are only 6 people currently) looking to bring technology to the dry-cleaning industry. The industry is ripe for innovation! We're building mobile apps, tackling scheduling and dispatch problems, and scaling a service at over 10% week-on-week growth for over 6 months now! I know 'app for laundry' is a tech cliché right now, but we're definitely encountering real demand. The problem is real, and we're solving it.
The team is very strong, with an HBS grad who grew up in a dry-cleaning family heading cleaning operations, a Stanford GSB grad with direct consumer startup experience heading customer acquisition, and a former Army Ranger managing our driver corps. I'm Stanford CS/EE, have built a few teams at various startups, and am just starting to build the technology and team to support this (very viable) business. The tech stack is Heroku / Python / Django / Celery / Phonegap / JQuery / Backbone / Twilio currently, but obviously there is plenty of opportunity to influence technology decisions early on, and plenty of opportunity to learn new technologies as well. We expect the next couple of hires to own entire new efforts, and have their hands in wide-ranging parts of our entire business.
We're looking for a Full-Stack Developer to develop interactivity for our customers and tools for our staff. We're doing things like route scheduling and planning, e-commerce funnel optimization, and analytics gathering for data-driven decision making.
We're also looking for a Director of Marketing. Rinse is a quintessential B2C business, with plenty of opportunities for online advertising, offline collateral, partnerships, and 'growth hacking.' We're building a scalable business model and the technology to support it, now help us scale the business. Please see a job description at http://bit.ly/1dLJigo - The sky's the limit!
Finally, if anyone in San Francisco is looking to make a few extra dollars part-time, Rinse is hiring part-time Associates to help us deliver clothes. We pay $25 per hour for a handful of hours per week. Perhaps it would be a way for some of you bootstrapping startups to earn a little extra cash? To apply to the Driver / Associate position, fill out this web form: https://docs.google.com/a/rinse.com/forms/d/1kWZYu1kg1r8kxdD....
Hacker News has definitely been our most successful recruiting channel. Thank you! Feel free to contact me at sam@rinse.com with questions, comments, or applications.
From the article:
If starting with an initial gap between 0 and the lowest
sample (sample minimum), the average gap between samples is
(m - k)/k; the -k being because the samples themselves are
not counted in computing the gap between samples.
I see this Hacker News post has a numerical ID in the URL, for example; I can estimate the size of Hacker News given enough of these numbers... More directly, I can modify that numerical ID to crawl Hacker News.
Many sites do this; it's generally better to generate a (random or hashed or generated from a natural key) 'slug' to use as the key instead. For example, Amazon generates a unique, non-sequential, 10-digit alphanumeric string for each item in their catalog.
That said, I'd definitely be happy to 'cut the cable' with Google Fiber in Palo Alto. There's already a bunch of dark fiber spanning the city, Google Fiber is already active in adjacent Stanford property, the residents are (in general) willing to pay for quality service, and the city is not so large as to make the project untenable.
Of course, Palo Alto has a long history of community / municipal connectivity projects with mixed success, and a notoriously-fractious decision making process, so nobody here is holding their breath...
We're hiring a Marketing person to help with this type of question: http://www.rinse.com/careers/
It's surprisingly difficult to build an efficient delivery service. To succeed you need knowledge of the peculiarities of the delivered goods, effective management of the delivery staff, and of course clever software. Route optimization and dispatch are interesting problems, but quality tools for drivers and other staff are just as important!
The team is very strong, with an HBS grad who grew up in a dry-cleaning family heading operations, and a Stanford GSB grad with direct consumer startup experience heading customer acquisition. I'm Stanford CS/EE, have built a few teams at various startups, and am just starting to build the technology and team to support this (very viable) business. The tech stack is Heroku / Python / Django / Celery / Phonegap / JQuery / Backbone / Twilio currently, but obviously there is plenty of opportunity to influence technology decisions early on, and plenty of opportunity to learn new technologies as well. We expect the next couple of hires to own entire new efforts, and have their hands in wide-ranging parts of our entire business.
We're looking for a Web Developer or Front-end Developer to develop interfaces for our customers, tools for our personnel, and visualizations for our managements. Ideally, this person would also have an active role in the design process as well, either leading design or working with our contract designer.
We're also looking for a Director of Marketing. Rinse is a quintessential B2C business, with plenty of opportunities for online advertising, offline collateral, partnerships, and 'growth hacking.' We're building a scalable business model and the technology to support it, now help us scale the business. Please see a job description at http://bit.ly/1dLJigo - The sky's the limit!
Finally, if anyone in San Francisco is looking to make a few extra dollars part-time, Rinse is hiring part-time Associates to help us deliver clothes. We pay $25 per hour for a handful of hours per week. Perhaps it would be a way for some of you bootstrapping startups to earn a little extra cash? To apply to the Driver / Associate position, fill out this web form: https://docs.google.com/a/rinse.com/forms/d/1kWZYu1kg1r8kxdD....
Hacker News has definitely been our most successful recruiting channel. Thank you! Feel free to contact me at sam@rinse.com with questions, comments, or applications.
For compute clusters, power is often the limiting factor; for storage clusters, weight is often the limiting factor. If you put these clusters in a general-purpose colocation facility, you'll end up with half-full racks. Density on a per-rack-unit basis is not necessarily important for most of us.
Of course, if you're Amazon's size, you build your own facilities, and you can make sure to support the weight and power requirements of whatever custom hardware you can dream up!
I know 'app for laundry' is a tech cliché right now, but we're definitely encountering real demand. The problem is real, and we're solving it.
The team is very strong, with an HBS grad who grew up in a dry-cleaning family heading operations, and a Stanford GSB grad with direct consumer startup experience heading customer acquisition. I'm Stanford CS/EE, have built a few teams at various startups, and am just starting to build the technology and team to support this (very viable) business. The tech stack is Heroku / Python / Django / Celery / Phonegap / JQuery / Backbone / Twilio currently, but obviously there is plenty of opportunity to influence technology decisions early on, and plenty of opportunity to learn new technologies as well. We expect the next couple of hires to own entire new efforts, and have their hands in wide-ranging parts of our entire business.
We're looking for a Web Developer or Front-end Developer to develop interfaces for our customers, tools for our personnel, and visualizations for our managements. Ideally, this person would also have an active role in the design process as well, either leading design or working with our contract designer.
We're also looking for a Director of Marketing. Rinse is a quintessential B2C business, with plenty of opportunities for online advertising, offline collateral, partnerships, and 'growth hacking.' We're building a scalable business model and the technology to support it, now help us scale the business. Please see a job description at http://bit.ly/1dLJigo - The sky's the limit!
Finally, if anyone in San Francisco is looking to make a few extra dollars part-time, Rinse is hiring part-time Associates to help us deliver clothes. We pay $25 per hour for a handful of hours per week. Perhaps it would be a way for some of you bootstrapping startups to earn a little extra cash? To apply to the Driver / Associate position, fill out this web form: https://docs.google.com/a/rinse.com/forms/d/1kWZYu1kg1r8kxdD...
Hacker News has definitely been our most successful recruiting channel. Thank you! Feel free to contact me at sam@rinse.com with questions, comments, or applications.
An electric kicker on a snowboard would be great, since it would be easy to keep up with skiers on long traverses. On the other hand, the extra weight is terrible - expensive snowboards use exotic composites to be lighter, and ounces matter when they're out on the ends of your feet.