sparkman55's comments

Rinse - www.rinse.com - Design District, San Francisco, CA

Rinse is a technology-enabled dry cleaning and laundry delivery service. We've been growing our service at an exponential rate for the past year, and our customers love us! We have a number of open positions, and have hired a significant portion of our team via Hacker News.

Rinse is hiring a Software Engineer to develop our functionality across the stack. We have hybrid mobile apps for both Android and iOS for our customers AND our drivers. We also have sophisticated web-based tools for our customer service team, internal operations staff, and vendors. Laundry is a surprisingly-complex logistical process, and so our customer-facing software is just the tip of the iceberg. We're solving problems like the Traveling Salesman and image classification, too. Our tech stack is approximately HTML5 / Backbone.js / Django / Python / Postgres / Heroku / Ubuntu, but we're a tiny tech team, so any newcomer will be able to shape architecture.

We're also hiring for a "Special Operations Associate" which is someone who may not have unique technical ability, but who has great aptitude and a willingness to work hard to improve our business. Analytical capability and attention to detail are important skills for this person. Bonus points for someone with an Industrial Engineering or Process Engineering background. This position is great for an ambitious hustler looking to join a "rocket ship" startup. Obviously, this position presents a significant growth opportunity.

Any applicant who we interview will receive $25 in free Rinse credit... If you live in San Francisco, give us a try!

Interested? I'd be happy to answer any questions at [email protected].

If you're already charging batteries for a hybrid electric drivetrain, perhaps the electric supercharger makes more sense? After all, the electric motor itself is used for extra torque when the gasoline engine is incapable. The energy to drive the supercharger could be recovered during regenerative braking...

This makes great sense! I'd guess this would be (relatively) easily integrated with a standard hybrid system, although the powertrain would be quite expensive (hybrid system PLUS turbocharger system).

I wonder if this would work well with a turbodiesel engine?

Also, I'm a bit confused: why is this not an electric supercharger? I thought the 'turbo' name meant that there was a turbine that spins using the engine exhaust gasses, which drives a compressor that compresses the intake air. This appears to spin using an electric motor instead...

Rinse - www.rinse.com - Design District, San Francisco, CA

Rinse is a technology-enabled dry cleaning and laundry delivery service. We've been growing our service at an exponential rate for the past year, and our customers love us! We have a number of open positions, and have hired a significant portion of our team via Hacker News.

Rinse is hiring a Software Engineer to develop our functionality across the stack. We have hybrid mobile apps for both Android and iOS for our customers AND our drivers. We also have sophisticated web-based tools for our customer service team, internal operations staff, and vendors. Laundry is a surprisingly-complex logistical process, and so our customer-facing software is just the tip of the iceberg. We're solving problems like the Traveling Salesman and image classification, too. Our tech stack is approximately HTML5 / Backbone.js / Django / Python / Postgres / Heroku / Ubuntu, but we're a tiny tech team, so any newcomer will be able to shape architecture.

We're also hiring for a "Special Operations Associate" which is someone who may not have unique technical ability, but who has great aptitude and a willingness to work hard to improve our business. Analytical capability and attention to detail are important skills for this person. Bonus points for someone with an Industrial Engineering or Process Engineering background. This position is great for an ambitious hustler looking to join a "rocket ship" startup. Obviously, this position presents a significant growth opportunity.

Any applicant who we interview will receive $25 in free Rinse credit! If you live in San Francisco, give us a try!

Interested? I'd be happy to answer any questions at [email protected].

If you're not sure if you want to play Diplomacy, you might read this article:

http://grantland.com/features/diplomacy-the-board-game-of-th...

Caltrain is already pretty good on the Peninsula. Since the various towns on the Peninsula were founded in the railroad era, the Caltrain stops conveniently in each downtown.

Where would a BART line run on the Peninsula? Down 101 from Millbrae? Such a route would cost billions over some of the most expensive real estate in the country, yet wouldn't serve the denser parts of the peninsula well.

Modernizing the Caltrain seems like a much better use of money. It's clear from the website that this stuff is very expensive!

If we want to dream, a BART extension from Milpitas through Santa Clara (and the new stadium) to link up with the light rail and Caltrain in downtown Mountain View would be awesome, though!

Rinse, Inc. - San Francisco (Design District), CA USA - www.rinse.com

Rinse is a technology-enabled dry cleaning and laundry delivery service. Our customers use a mobile app, our website, or SMS to schedule a delivery, and then we use sophisticated software and processes to 'level up' what is still mostly a pen-and-paper industry. We've been growing exponentially for over a year now; if you live in SF and haven't heard of us, you will soon!

Before considering joining our team, you might try out our service. Send me an email and I'll make sure you get a credit.

We're hiring Software Developers of all experience levels to solve problems ranging from the capacitated vehicle routing problem to image processing to linux kiosks. We're primarily Django + Bootstrap.js with a healthy dose of Celery + Heroku + Ubuntu. Big bonus points if you have history in the industry!

We're also hiring a Customer Experience Specialist. No technical skills are necessary for this role, but you'll need well-developed empathy and solid written and verbal communication skills. We have absolutely stellar customer satisfaction and retention statistics, and we aim to keep it that way! If you want to join a rapidly-growing startup in San Francisco, but aren't an elite hacker, here's your chance!

Finally, at our current growth rate, we're hiring part-time drivers constantly. If you have a car, a clean driving record, and want a part time job with evening hours, join us! The job is great for students, or perhaps those who want a little extra cash while bootstrapping their startup.

If you have any questions about any of these roles, please do not hesitate to email me directly at sam <at> rinse.com

I'd argue that California's water management infrastructure is doing a great job. For example, the Crystal Springs reservoir, which supplies San Francisco, has remained nearly full [1], and municipalities haven't undertaken rationing or other drastic measures beyond "rat out your neighbors if they are watering the sidewalk."

This means that not only is the reservoir system keeping water in the taps of California's 38 million residents, but at least some of it is also keeping enough of a reserve to deal with catastrophes like an earthquake severing the pipelines that supply water to the San Francisco Bay Area.

[1] http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi-progs/queryMonthly?CRY

Depending on how 'huge' your timeseries are, you might be pleasantly surprised with Postgres. Postgres scales to multiple TB just fine, and of course the software can be easier to write since you have SQL and ORMs to rely on. It's also an incredibly mature and stable software package, if you're worried about future-proofing.

Some (constantly-growing) timeseries can be stored on a per-row basis, while other (static or older) timeseries can be stored in a packed form (e.g. an array column).

I find that most of the time, "Big Data" isn't really all that big for modern hardware, and so going through all of the extra software work for specialized data stores isn't really all that necessary. YMMV, of course, depending on the nature of your queries.

For all *.0 releases, this is a great idea!

It's not clear from the (beautiful!) article, but 4 times as much water goes to agricultural use than to municipal use in California. People won't die of thirst in California, but crops aren't doing as well.

In particular, orchards spread through much of California's central valley. These are perennial plants (trees or vines), living decades in some cases.

If you've mortgaged the farm to plant acres of fruit or nut trees, you're not going to let them die in a drought. You'll fight hard for any running water you can get your hands on, and then you'll dig wells and suck as much water out of the ground as your trees need.

Groundwater has been (uncharacteristically!) unregulated in California, so aggressive ranchers or farmers can draw down the water table, threatening their neighbors' wells and causing a 'tragedy of the commons' situation and a race to drill. Sucking all that water out of the ground has all sorts of environmental concerns - as a result, California just passed laws to become the last western state to regulate groundwater usage.

The Android toolchain is also significantly less developer-friendly than the corresponding iOS toolchain.

Plug in an iPhone, and (after jumping through the byzantine code-signing system) you'll be able to deploy development code to it (from an OSX environment). If your app runs on one iPhone, it probably runs well on another, barring some screen geometry concerns.

Plug in an Android device, and you might need to search around to find a manufacturer-specific toolset, and/or navigate secret menus to enable debugging (like "click this menu item that doesn't look like a button seven times"). You might also have to worry about ancient devices that can't be updated to a modern Android version, and have egregious platform bugs. Comparatively, it's a mess.

If you visit Bellingham, you'd do well to visit one of the best brewpubs on the West Coast: Boundary Bay Brewery, home to award-winning IPAs (often available from the cask) and a surprisingly-solid menu.

With a university and proximity to Seattle and Vancouver, I'm not too surprised to see a nascent techie scene. A little stimulus would be good for the local economy, which has been quite depressed.

When I flick my fingers up, I expect a smooth vertical movement of the view pane, exposing new content at the bottom. I can scroll fast and far if I want to scan for interesting content, and scroll backwards if I might have missed something. Every other web page does this, except this one. It subverts the conventional affordance of the scroll wheel / two-finger scroll.

The recent NYTimes article about ISIS in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers ( http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/03/world/middleea... ) is a much better treatment of the scroll.

If I'm going to be subjected to lengthy animations between slides, I generally expect arrows left-and-right to click on.

The whole 'scroll to begin' language on an otherwise beautiful page is a usability smell. See http://www.harmoni.ca/blog/affordances

Yikes, what did they do to the page's "scroll" function?

Do people actually find that usable? It definitely made me think the page was broken at first... The slideshow seems like a 'play' (right-arrow) much more than a 'scroll' (down-arrow).

Is this a metaphor for Dyson vacuums in general? (Technically-clever, shiny, but not necessarily the most effective)

There's a really cool snowblower train that plies Donner Pass between Sacramento and Reno:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItdRfvYHPAY

Rinse - https://www.rinse.com - San Francisco, CA

Rinse is a technology-enabled dry cleaning and laundry delivery service. Our customers use a mobile app, our website, or SMS to schedule a delivery, and then we use sophisticated software and processes to 'level up' what is still mostly a pen-and-paper industry. We've been growing exponentially for a year now; if you live in SF and haven't heard of us, you will soon!

We're hiring a senior software developer to solve problems ranging from the capacitated vehicle routing problem to image processing to linux kiosks. We're primarily Django + Bootstrap.js with a healthy dose of Celery + Heroku + Ubuntu. Big bonus points if you have history in the industry!

We're also hiring a Customer Experience Specialist. No technical skills are necessary for this role, but you'll need well-developed empathy and solid written and verbal communication skills. We have absolutely stellar customer satisfaction and retention statistics, and we aim to keep it that way! If you want to join a rapidly-growing startup in San Francisco, but aren't an elite hacker, here's your chance!

If you have any questions about either of these roles, please do not hesitate to email me directly at sam <at> rinse.com

A number of people live in (beautiful!) Santa Cruz but commute over the hill to work in San Jose or elsewhere in Silicon Valley. It's a long commute on a treacherous but crowded mountain highway, so it's no surprise that they need to wake up early to beat traffic.

Frankly, it's a pretty terrible sport hunting rifle. The round is too small for most big game, and the cartridge is too powerful for most small game.

The mainstay of sport hunters is actually the 12-gauge shotgun.

Hunting isn't really a good justification for the proliferation of AR-platform rifles, and is definitely a non-sequitur when discussing the armament of our police force.

Most people use an infrared thermometer 'gun' for this. You can buy them at Home Depot...