If you decide to pivot based on the comments in this thread about this turning into UberDrugz, an underserved market adjacent to this space is LTL freight.

For an example of this look for items on eBay whose shipping method is “freight.” As a buyer (or sometimes seller, if your buyer is clueless) of one of those items, it is your responsibility to arrange an LTL freight carrier (flatbed or liftgate truck). Fastenal and Uber freight will accept 1 pallet, up to a certain weight limit; you may even be responsible to bring it to a freight hub yourself. Above that size you’re on your own calling trucking companies, and renting a forklift or crane when you actually find a trucker.

It’s a smaller market than small packages, but more revenue per transaction. And if you figure it out and get it up and running, eBay (e.g.) might allow buyers and sellers to automatically select your service as the shipping method instead of black box “freight.”

Source = my personal experience 1. selling a metal building kit on eBay that the local zoning board would not let me erect. 2. Buying a large greenhouse kit online

mAh has always seemed silly to me as well. I get that the actual voltage of a battery is a function of battery charge %, load current, temperature and “other stuff”, but the battery designer/manufacturer knows all this… Why not just tell us how much energy is in it {,k,M}Wh or {,k,M}J?

It seems like it’s quite HTTP-centric (like most of the web…). I didn’t see anything on the page about this - can it also intercept / “reverse engineer” service calls that go over gRPC or WebSocket? I’m guessing at least a partial “yes” if the gRPC traffic uses grpc-web/Envoy?

Seems like a great product, potentially quite powerful for automated testing of SPAs.

Yep we handle gRPC and websocket. gRPC is a bit sketch/hard to do because of the way the protocol is designed. FWIW not many sites implement gRPC (some google sites and spotify being the only two I can think of), and if they do they usually have decent APIs. Feel free to try and lmk if you have any issues!

so how do you parse gRPC binary? unless you have proto definitions, it is blackbox and is totally unsuable, isn't it?

gRPC obscures the keys not the values. Enums and signed ints are sort of tricky, but the latter is just a mapping problem and the former can be figured out through some logical deduction. gRPC isn't designed to obscure request content, but for over the wire efficiency.

I’m trying to wrap my head around the use case this was created for. If a python service dumps a numpy array to bytes and sends that as a payload to a C++ service, is that blob of bytes not interpretable by C++ as e.g. a struct with some size fields and a pointer to the start of the array? (Cutting out the filesystem/npy file)

Maybe I’m overthinking it but I can’t quite envision a use case where a python service and C++ service would be sharing a filesystem

Many research labs generate GBs of data as npy files. Having readers in languages other than Python is useful when you have programs in other languages that need to process them.

You spelled Fortran wrong :)

We still are using a few Fortran programs mixed with python programs and who know how many other languages. Anyway, we are using text files in ascii, because when something get's wrong it's easier to debug.

Since an .npy file is the standard binary format for saving a single NumPy array to disk I guess I can imagine a situation where people are doing so.

I am curious, did you check how much your benchmarks moved (time and errors) if at all if you told the compiler to use —-use_fast_math or -ffast-math?

There’s generally not a faster version of inverse trig functions to inline, but it might optimize some other stuff out.

Unrelated to that, I’ve seen implementations (ie julia/base/special/trig) that use a “rational approximation” to asin, did you go down that road at any point?