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Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

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Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#91

Post by sincerely »

forgottenpass wrote: post #84
sincerely wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN loves to talk about how CS needs ethics courses - this is a great example :|

Not... really... Chik-fil-a is only a useful example in so far as how well the ethical throughlines match things we've seen many times before, the media has taught us to care about, and how much time and effort political interest groups have spent highlighting those to the public. Ethical thinking on this topic will not be engaged, people will take the opinion their political affiliation and chosen memes have predest…

I agree that there are many important ethical questions that are bypassed in the day-to-day of those companies for sure, but at the same time I think there is an attitude here of "who cares what happens with the company's money once it leaves my area, they are solving interesting problems and the people working for them are doing intellectually engaging work".

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#92

Post by monocasa »

sheepmullet wrote: post #86
monocasa wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All discussions are political. The only question is whether or not the politics at hand affect you. And to quote Chick-fil-a's CEO: "Jesus had a lot of things to say about people who work and live in the business community … Our work should be an act of worship. Our work should be our mission field." So he sees everything they do as political as well.

> All discussions are political. Nonsense. A certain subset of our society insists on making everything political. Most of us don’t like it because it ruins otherwise interesting conversations.

Or... your privilege allows you to ignore the political consequences of most conversations.

What do you think politics is? Like an actual definition.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#93

Post by ve55 »

benatkin wrote: post #72
ve55 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chik-Fil-A is not an arbiter of LGBTQ rights. Their small 6-figure donations to organizations that focus on other issues do very little in the grand scheme of things. Do you really think Chik-Fil-A is directly causing more suffering by donating to a few charities in amounts this small than by raising in captivity and then killing billions of chickens? I see no way to reasonably argue that.

Chick-Fil-A is just the service provider, if not for Chick-Fil-A people would get their chicken elsewhere. If they were raised in a place that felt less like captivity, that would probably be worse for the environment, in terms of using more natural resources per pound of chicken produced. There are trade-offs to everything. Chick-Fil-A isn't really in the meat business, they're in the restaurant business, and given…

Most effective altruists would agree with you (and thus disagree with a possible takeaway from Chik-Fil-A's advertising) that eating chicken is better than cows, as cows provide significantly more meat than a chicken, with ratios being up to 50 chickens per every 1 cow, as far as quantity of meat for normal portions go. In other words, someone eating only chicken may kill X chickens, but someone eating only cows may kill 1/50X cows. Of course there are other variables involved like weighing the differences between these animals, their treatments, lifespans, etc., but it is nonetheless a point with notable weight. Although this isn't quite the area I was getting at, just that the most significant things should be looked at first, all else constant.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#94

Post by joezydeco »

ballenf wrote: post #75
joezydeco wrote: post #30

Having worked with some of CFA's competition and comparing their IoT architectures, I'd say these guys have their heads on straight. Kudos to them.

I've never been to a retail establishment with anything close to the credit card speed of CFA. The cashier can swipe and grab receipt in one smooth and quick motion. It's so fast you feel like it's broken or slight of hand. I wonder how they do it or why other companies can't or don't do it. CFA stores are so much busier than even an average McDonald's, maybe the efficiency gains are just worth more. No idea how they…

From what I understand, merchants can do a quicker swipe (basically record the card # and transaction amount without waiting for authorization), but the merchant fees are slightly higher because of the possible higher fraud/chargeback rate. It's up to the chain to decide on what to do.

Perhaps CFA can do it even better since they could possibly keep a database of bad cards at the edge. Remember those books that cashiers used to thumb through to verify if a card was stolen?

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#95

Post by stochastic_monk »

electricslpnsld wrote: post #89
wuliwong wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in Atlanta and have had a few discussions with people at Chik-fil-A (CFA) about joining on of their teams. I have a good friend that just moved from Intel to CFA working on business analytics. It seems like a really great place to work. And yes, whenever I mention to someone that I might be working on machine learning problems at CFA I always get a puzzled look in return. :)

> machine learning problems at CFA This is prime deep fried learning pun territory...

Alex Smola already nailed this in 2015 with deep-fried convnets, which replaces fully connected layers with fft-accelerated algorithms.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#96

Post by leesalminen »

benatkin wrote: post #72
ve55 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chik-Fil-A is not an arbiter of LGBTQ rights. Their small 6-figure donations to organizations that focus on other issues do very little in the grand scheme of things. Do you really think Chik-Fil-A is directly causing more suffering by donating to a few charities in amounts this small than by raising in captivity and then killing billions of chickens? I see no way to reasonably argue that.

Chick-Fil-A is just the service provider, if not for Chick-Fil-A people would get their chicken elsewhere. If they were raised in a place that felt less like captivity, that would probably be worse for the environment, in terms of using more natural resources per pound of chicken produced. There are trade-offs to everything. Chick-Fil-A isn't really in the meat business, they're in the restaurant business, and given…

> Finally if you're going to get people excited about animal rights, it's probably better to mention cows than chickens. To me, Chick-Fil-A's ads suggest eating chicken as a lesser of two evils, without ever saying that eating chicken is evil.

I posted this article to our company #random channel and that was the first reply- better chicken than beef!

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#97

Post by api »

walrus01 wrote: post #46
api wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that remain true if you grossly over-provision the SD card? Use a 64GB card for 1GB of data and you have a lot of wear leveling space.

The write lifespan in DWPD on any sd card is a tiny fraction of the expected lifespan of even a cheap $55 consumer SSD. Part of the problem is that even if you only write 1GB per day the card is highly likely to reuse the same sectors over and over.

Don't most modern SD cards contain some wear leveling logic?

I did a bunch of research on this a while back and the conclusion I found was: yes, but buy name-brand better rated cards to avoid cheapo cards that do not do wear leveling or do it very badly.

It's nowhere near as good as SSD drives, but it's better than just a naked flash chip... unless I'm wrong.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#98

Post by mjcl »

ballenf wrote: post #75
joezydeco wrote: post #30

Having worked with some of CFA's competition and comparing their IoT architectures, I'd say these guys have their heads on straight. Kudos to them.

I've never been to a retail establishment with anything close to the credit card speed of CFA. The cashier can swipe and grab receipt in one smooth and quick motion. It's so fast you feel like it's broken or slight of hand. I wonder how they do it or why other companies can't or don't do it. CFA stores are so much busier than even an average McDonald's, maybe the efficiency gains are just worth more. No idea how they…

Petsmart was like the before the chip change over. It would typically take a few hundred MS to get approval and print the receipt.

I have noticed that some chipotle cashiers print the receipt before the card goes through, the CFA cashiers could be doing something similar.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#99

Post by unit91 »

unit91 wrote: post #74
monocasa wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All discussions are political. The only question is whether or not the politics at hand affect you. And to quote Chick-fil-a's CEO: "Jesus had a lot of things to say about people who work and live in the business community … Our work should be an act of worship. Our work should be our mission field." So he sees everything they do as political as well.

Not political. Religious. For those of us who are Christians, our politics are driven by our religion, not the other way around. The Heidelberg Catechism sums it up well: > Q. What is your only comfort in life and in death? > A. That I am not my own, but belong — body and soul, in life and in death — to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.

monocasa,

HN won't let me reply to your next comment, but regarding:

> a reflection of their religious principles or their political ones

This is actually a common misunderstanding and what I'm trying to explain. "Religious principles OR political principles" means there are actually (at least) TWO categories of ideas a person holds, with specific items (homosexuality, death penalty, etc.) falling inside one of those categories.

That's a secular worldview, and it isn't how Christians think. We have one category: God. God is sovereign, he owns everything including me. As Thomas Aquinas said "all truth is God's truth". When we're being consistent (key caveat), we approach all issues as "what does God want me to do?". Political activities follow from there. We often disagree about those secondary conclusions (what God wants from us regarding issue X), but not the core starting point (ultimate allegiance is to God alone).

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#100

Post by sheepmullet »

monocasa wrote: post #92
sheepmullet wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All discussions are political. Nonsense. A certain subset of our society insists on making everything political. Most of us don’t like it because it ruins otherwise interesting conversations.

Or... your privilege allows you to ignore the political consequences of most conversations. What do you think politics is? Like an actual definition.

> Or... your privilege allows you to ignore the political consequences of most conversations.

What political consequences are there to most conversations?

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