sparkman55

44 ms·

1.
by sparkman55 11y ago
Funny you should mention meteorological use cases. At a previous startup, we built global historical weather data sets (at 5km resolution, 30+ year hourly time series), accessible via a metered API. This took HPC, storage, and engineering
2.
by sparkman55 11y ago
Ground speed doesn't seem like a feature to me - after all, the ideal is an unblinking 'eye in the sky' that provides high-resolution video for large regions a la ARGUS. A stationary observer seems like it would provide more
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by sparkman55 11y ago
For a long time, public satellite imagery came from satellites flown by the US Geological Survey (USGS). They came in two flavors: geostationary and low-earth orbit. The geostationary satellites are perched very high above the earth, and t
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by sparkman55 11y ago
"Pixel Perfect" - awesome! The google logo looks particularly 'pixel perfect.' Seems like some "sub-pixel" texturing could be done by drawing different characters a la ascii art. See http://en.wiki
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by sparkman55 11y ago
Well, the innovation is really about storing electricity. We've been generating and transmitting electricity for over a century now. Once we can store electricity (in batteries, for example), then intermittent power sources, like sola
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by sparkman55 11y ago
RINSE - https://www.rinse.com - Santa Monica, CA and 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 two years, a
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by sparkman55 12y ago
I couldn't believe that the new 49ers stadium (in Santa Clara) cost a trillion dollars, so I looked it up. It cost $1.2 billion [1] - a "gigabuck" rather than a "terabuck." To put that in perspective, a single off
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by sparkman55 12y ago
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
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by sparkman55 12y ago
The oft-cited statistic is "97% of climate scientists believe in anthropogenic climate change" and the wikipedia article [1] is actually quite thorough. I personally do not know any scientist who doesn't believe in global wa
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by sparkman55 12y ago
They have bunch of blends to choose from, and serve carefully-made single-drip "Third-wave" coffees. The order process is a bit chaotic, which makes the whole thing seem nice and quaint. Plus, they do little things like aerate t
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by sparkman55 12y ago
Google Ventures invested in Blue Bottle. Their (excellent!) designers-in-residence showcase the work they did to help: http://www.gv.com/lib/behind-the-scenes-with-blue-bottle-and...
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by sparkman55 12y ago
In rural areas, it's actually common to have a gas pump near the garage. After all, what are you going to do, drive your tractor to town to fill up?
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by sparkman55 12y ago
There is an excellent New Yorker article on fecal transplants and gut flora. The article spends considerable time talking about the donors, and the rigorous screening process to make sure the donated bacteria are good ones. Obviously, that
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by sparkman55 12y ago
A space railgun is theoretically possible, but you'll still need a rocket to circularize the orbit. In practice, a rocket goes up (out of most of the atmosphere) before going fast. A projectile fired out of a railgun would be going at
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by sparkman55 12y ago
I've built a number of teams, and have repeatedly had the fortune of anchoring the back-end with a senior engineer over age 50. Experience matters, and it helps the entire team from a morale, design, and process perspective. You don&
16.
by sparkman55 12y ago
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
17.
by sparkman55 12y ago
For cables, Monoprice is also a good alternative (and, generally, price-competitive with Amazon). Another commenter mentioned that Monoprice's HDMI quality has declined; I haven't noticed any problem with their Ethernet and USB ca
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by sparkman55 12y ago
As I understand it, there are fins that deploy in order to steer the rocket on the way back down (the first stage). They are really cool "Grid Fins" [1] that work even in supersonic flight. In particular, they are used to preven
19.
by sparkman55 12y ago
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
20.
by sparkman55 12y ago
There's a difference between requests that the user "expects" to take a long time, and those that can never be fast enough. For example, POSTs, credit card transactions, and things like Wikipedia edits generally have lengthy
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by sparkman55 12y ago
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
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by sparkman55 12y ago
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 energ
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by sparkman55 12y ago
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
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by sparkman55 12y ago
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! W
25.
by sparkman55 12y ago
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...
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by sparkman55 12y ago
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 Mil
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by sparkman55 12y ago
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 sophi
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by sparkman55 12y ago
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
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by sparkman55 12y ago
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
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by sparkman55 12y ago
For all *.0 releases, this is a great idea!

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