BufordTJustice's comments

Trucks are very hard on the roadbed, especially given that road damage scales proportionally to the fourth power of the axle weight. For the same reason we don't ship all of our goods in tons of little cars, but use trucks with GVWR potentially many times greater, similar efficiency is pretty simple with trains in that they require less operators and prime movers to move more goods in the same amount of time.

I think it's to the fourth power with axle weight.

Armin is right; further more, I suspect a lot of technology like MegaSquirt will continue to improve, and we'll have (thank god) aftermarket ECMs to put into these cars to give the user more control over the vehicle.

We can only hope that a similar movement to Linux on PCs builds up steam up in the automotive space, as many of us like being able to understand, adapt, and improve on our vehicles.

The problem with all of these, with the exception of Rust and Ada, is that it's hard to do things like, get at pointers directly, for example. For all of the abstractions OCaml and Java bring, there is an often large performance penalty to pay, and when you're pass producing an embedded product, that's money you're leaving on the table because you're asking for more compute power than you actually need to get the job done. Ada is usually a pretty good choice, but it's hard to find developers outside of the defense industry; Rust on the other hand is often view (perhaps rightfully so) as still experimental and unproven.

At least in the storage space (which gets essentially no press on HN), I have come to the finding that the vast majority of core product codebases are C/C++. For the niche they fill, it seems really unlikely that even the still experimental Rust would replace them here.

Under some circumstances, if you're running periodic jobs, APScheduler works well in a pinch.

So, is this supposed to compete with the offerings from Pure Storage and Solidfire?

Still, it kind of seems like a blog for Kenworth demoing someone using a giant truck to race around a track, I mean I guess you can do it, but it doesn't seem like the intended application.

I guess I'd like to understand why people don't agree. Just to be clear, it's really important that we shore up tractor trailer safety (I've been hit by a class 8 rig twice now, once where the driver was asleep at wheel), but the cost of this really needs to be borne by the companies and not the drivers; as a consequence, you know, in order to get more safety on the road, product prices may go up. I am OK with this though.

I feel like using RethinkDB, instead of something like SQLite (or if you absolutely insist on NoSQL, maybe LevelDB or BerkeleyDB) kind of seems like using a supertanker for a tugboat's job. Especially if you're going to write your temperature sensor logger in Python, and it's just being used as an embedded application, SQLite really seems like one of the smarter choices you could make there. Maybe the point is to demo RethinkDB features, but wouldn't it make sense for the Python script to also emit the status data and send notifications as well, without needing all those extra Node dependencies?

Also, maybe I'm just crazy, but man I can't believe people are encouraging others to curl stuff from the internet right into a shell. Especially on Raspian where the default Pi user has NOPASSWD in sudoers, this seems like a bad practice that we shouldn't encourage.

I second this. The working hours and toll sitting in a tractor like that all day are bad, but if you do things like cut hours for drivers, especially the drivers that aren't owner-operators, and continue them at the same pay, you unfortunately will push a huge contingent of people further out into the margins. I am all for increased safety, and very much think the drivers are on the road way too much, but I fear additional safety or hours cuts will be disproportionately borne by the drivers, who really usually can't afford it anyways. Apparently truck driving is a very common job to work too[1].

[1] - http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-t...

It's amazing, I'm not really in tune with the state of the art with drones (but fly a little Cherokee Arrow, to give some perspective, and have friends that have been RC enthusiasts going back significantly). I looked on Youtube for that DJI Phantom you mentioned, and all I can say is, wow. It is truly amazing how poorly behaved and entitled some of the operators are, especially in comparison to a lot of the RC guys that have proceeded them. I remember that the RC planes only could be flow in restricted areas (unpopulated, usually), and you had to be real careful regardless. I know those guys were just happy the city let them fly their RC planes at their little airstrip near the dump, and tended to be respectful of airspace.

In contrast a lot of these drone owners act like they should be able to fly everywhere at any time, and have their craft be exempt from the same governance that aircraft seem to obey, and RC at least seemed to use to have to adhere to. I guess it's even more crazy to me that the vast majority of Youtube comments seem to like to compare FAA regulations to some sort of facist plot. I really don't understand why drone and RC pilots don't have to obey similar if not the same kind of regulations planes do, as it would probably save us from so many stupid incidents, like the drone recently preventing fire helicopters from handling that highway accident in California. [1] I am also shocked that the UVA student flying that drone over campus [2] only got a $10,000 fine; just watching that video of the flight made me cringe so much, at the amount of dangerous and recklessly negligent behavior. I am a little worried that as RC gets democratized in the form of drones, and grows way beyond the hobbyist following it had in yesteryear that we're going to have to clamp down in a significant way because of the lack of understanding/caring and the abuses that get perpetrated by a contingent of asinine, but hopefully few, reckless drone operators.

[1] - http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/18/us/california-freeway-fire/ [2] - http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/9/4821094/remote-aircraft-pi...

> Yeah, but by giving more data you let software to personalize better. So by reducing your data exposure you are acting as techno-Luddite stiffing progress.

Is this sarcasm? I guess I fail to understand how Google now knowing all the details of my life impedes "progress". It shouldn't stop them from developing new technology; why does the "cloud" need to figure out how to "personalize" things more for me anyways, outside of the obvious answer to serve up better targeted ads (which I'd rather make go away by any means necessary)?

Just as a note, if range is really one of the selling points, I have found Mikrotik's RB951 class routers to be relatively affordable and have excellent range and features, for significantly less than OnHub ($20-80 for a good home router). OpenWRT routers with a lot of the same features, and the ability to boost range can also be sourced for even less.

I would be very interested in helping write some code or contributing money towards making improvements to lock down phone home and other unwanted behavior. I think an excellent starting point is to see if you couldn't take a Mikrotik or OpenWRT/Tomato router and bake a lot of this extra filtering and functionality in. For some of the things that Google advertises like speed checks or choosing an optimal channel or whatever, should be do-able in open source firmware, so I think it would be hugely beneficial, at least for me (and probably many others).

I agree, I think if you're going to deploy an application that's facing the internet, it makes sense to take the time to roll the deployment scripts (Salt, Ansible, etc.) and understand at some level what is getting installed, as well as how it's configured and how what needs to be setup for security, rather than just trusting the image.