Recent submissions

Comment · 10 years ago
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.
Comment · 10 years ago
I think it's to the fourth power with axle weight.
Comment · 10 years ago
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.

Comment · 10 years ago
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.
Comment · 10 years ago
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.
Comment · 11 years ago
Under some circumstances, if you're running periodic jobs, APScheduler works well in a pinch.
Comment · 11 years ago
So, is this supposed to compete with the offerings from Pure Storage and Solidfire?
Comment · 11 years ago
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.
Comment · 11 years ago
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.
Comment · 11 years ago
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.

Comment · 11 years ago

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