What happens if the 2nd signal (after the 200ms delay) is never received? Would keeping the relay closed like that cause any issues?
I wonder if a more "robust" way to handle this would be a custom microcontroller on the receiving end that receives a single Zigbee signal and implements the 200ms delay internally.
Yeah, that's definitely true. I find that I'll often be excited about an idea and immediately start putting in the time to build a rough prototype. Once I realize the true scale of the effort involved I second-guess my commitment to the idea - is this really something I want to spend the next year+ working on? I think having that clear vision and enough conviction that the results will be worthwhile is very important and definitely something I struggle with.
Nice to see that they're just using EC2 + S3 instead of a whole suite of niche cloud offerings that we see these days. Maybe this is mentioned in the linked presentation (https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Pinterest/) but are they using managed databases? Or just running their own on EC2 instances as well?
How did you bail without losing your deposit? I would have thought if you were the highest bidder you'd either be on the hook for the full purchase or lose your deposit.
Do you see the deposit amount and all the details of the escalation from the triggering offer in that case?
Say I saw that the triggering offer had a measly deposit and I suspected it of being fake. Would I be on the hook to prove it? Technically if I rescind my offer at this point I lose my own deposit, right?
> putting down $500 earnest money on a $300K house would look suspicious enough to get you ignored by the buyer
Assuming you mean the seller here? If I were the seller I too would ignore that kind of offer but first I'd let it push all the other escalation clauses up ;)
Not really related to the article but something I've been wondering...
In recent years the housing market has been so competitive that escalation clauses are often written into offers. They typically include a base offer of $X and then an agreement to escalate that value by increments (maybe $1-5k at a time) up to some cap. All the offers are collected by a certain date and then an auction is run behind the scenes by the realtors involved.
What's to stop a seller from having one of their friends enter into one of these escalations? Submit a non-serious offer with a high escalation and include a minimal deposit which would be forfeited if that fake offer happens to win but otherwise hope it comes in 2nd to push everyone else's escalation up.
Yeah, this is exactly what I do as well. I'd be curious to hear more about your deployment process, specifically how you get your Docker image onto the VPS. Do you just push to a registry like DockerHub and then pull it down on the VPS?
Does this use the battery? Not clear to me if the Kindle program is running continuously or if it just periodically starts up, refreshes the screen and then powers back down.
Is there something about the actual profiler that differs from existing tools like pyinstrument [1] or py-spy [2]? I know pyinstrument has various output options and I wonder if it could potentially output something readable by the Firefox Profiler tool.
I feel the same way. I've been doing web-related stuff for about 13 years now and have lost much of my interest. Started dabbling with electronics and embedded systems about 5 years ago and it completely re-piqued my interest in writing software. I'm still doing backendy web things for money but would love to move away from that. Any recommendations for moving into the embedded field professionally? What sort of companies are you working for?
I totally agree, they're really great for simple hobby projects! I've mostly used the ATTiny85 and it's easy to understand the datasheet, easy to program, battery efficient and comes in a DIP-8 form factor for easy breadboarding. Compared with something like an STM32 I find it quite fun to work with!
Fantastic write up - thank you! I also love hearing about why each part was chosen. As an electronics hobbyist I often mimic portions of others' designs but I'm not always entirely sure why a certain part was chosen among the various options.
Do you prototype all this on a breadboard before making the PCB and picking specific parts? I'd be curious to hear more about your process. I feel like I always need to test everything I build on a breadboard first since I inevitably miss some small detail if I go straight to schematic + PCB design.
Does anyone have any recommendations of books or other resources that go over the theory behind full-text search? i.e. language processing, data encoding, on-disk storage and retrieval, etc.