MrDunham

I vaguely recall back in one of my engineering classes we did the math on turning all of the stationary bikes at the gym into power generating units.

I believe the result was that the value of power generated was so utterly dwarfed by the costs in copper, inverters, etc. - not to mention additional maintenance costs - that it was at least an order of magnitude outside of making sense.

Some of those economics certainly have changed over the last 15 years but many (I’m looking at you, copper) are rather fixed and won’t go down over time.

Also

> 1.4 TRex bites worth of force

I have never seen T Rex bites as a unit of measurement before and I love it.

Ask Warren Buffet - he’s never invested in safe things. /s

Though seriously, looking at Buffet - he invested in incredibly safe companies (ones generally valued at below their book value, at least for the first few decades) and used a bunch of leverage on them to make top-10 global wealth.

It bugs me (seems like it does for you, too) to hear the “you need risk for reward”.

Safe !== broke, and risky!== rich. But too many people equate ”safe” and bonds or index funds (which also won’t make you broke, they just won’t generate generational wealth for the most part).

Correct.

On a side note, counties here a little bit wonky. I live in Dublin which is about 20 minutes out of Marysville.

If you live in Dublin you could be living in one of THREE counties

I don’t know the exact details but I have heard that Epstein is a big reason that Les is not CEO anymore.

So, I live in Columbus Ohio and I’m friends with two of the top people in our economic development department the broker this deal.

I can’t speak well to why not Cleveland but I can say that the actual city that they chose (New Albany, OH, 25 min to downtown and 15-20 to the airport) was built by Les Wexner, founder of L brands/Victoria’s Secret, is now home to data centers for Facebook, Google, and an AWS data center (there are two more within 30 minutes), and the general metro is one of the fastest growing regions in the US.

There is also a ton of available land on the fringes of the Columbus region and the sheer scope of acreage needed is bonkers.

Having moved to Columbus a couple years ago everyone loved to say that over 60% of the US population is within a one day drive of Columbus.

For the Bay Area readers the distance from Cleveland to Columbus is roughly the same as San Francisco to Sacramento

> Building cars is also an international affair and we see those plants all over the place

I moved from the Bay Area to Columbus Ohio and, funny enough, there’s a Honda factory about 30 minutes outside of downtown and 45 from the airport.

this is a fantastic answer for several reasons and I’m commenting because an upvote alone just doesn’t do it justice.

> I also believe your conviction could be turned into your strong asset - you already have a unique and genuine story to tell

I so love this. It reminds me of Frank Abagnale, Jr., whose story is told in “Catch me if you can“. He went from convicted felon to savior of the banking industry and implemented a ton of solutions to the very things he exploited.

> you could get a speaker slot any any AML|Legal + tech related conference.

this is also a wonderful suggestion that could help you rapidly reframe your story.

> I also believe going informal networking is more efficient then going through the formal recruitment process

Can confirm this is crucial. I am the son of an executive recruiter who placed a ton of CFOs into midsize startups back in the dot-com days. When Mom was teaching me how to land jobs she suggested only using job boards and the like to get a feel for who is hiring and then networking in.

Would be even more important with special circumstances like yours. People hire people, not resumes for the most part.

I also know at least one company who specifically hires only ex-cons (in construction so this isn’t directly relevant to you) to help them get on their feet and keep them from repeat offending out of desperation.

----- The rest of this post is wonderful too but I don’t have much more to add to it.

The nice thing about jobhunting is you only need one person to say yes.

Reframing your problem into an asset and thinking about how you could uniquely help the industry could set you apart in a positive way.

Hah! This got a nice laugh out of me. Can't imagine the number of unique challenges that arise due to DefCon's audience and content. (Not implying bad, just... different. For example fabricating credentials.)

I used to host some small-mid sized events (100-200 person hackathons) and that was difficult enough without having anyone poking around at my security/processes.

Not only are you correct (I mixed them up), but now I know about steel manning and am a fan. Thanks for the support and understanding - have a wonderful day!

Thanks, you're correct on all counts.

Labor day. The tests are "available" but not available anywhere nearby for us. PCR only (maybe they're actually available now, but they weren't then.)

Anyways I really need to stop posting to HN in the AM before I've had enough coffee... I make too many half-brained stupid mistakes.

Shoot. You're correct. You'd think since my mother went into labor with me on labor day, I'd actually remember it. Thanks.

Crap. Yes I meant Labor day. You'd think since my mother went into labor with me on labor day, I'd actually remember it.

That's what I get for posting in the morning. Good catch.

This is correct. No lying was needed (we did do the tests, they were negative, etc.) Only I was forced to alter the documents because the automated systems kept rejecting mine due to my birthday being too close, but outside of the window (as evidenced by it immediately accepting it once I removed my birthday).

So… Fun story about how I submitted semi false COVID paperwork in order to gain entry into Italy.

In September my wife and I went on a delayed vacation to Italy. At the time they required Covid tests to be completed no more than three days before arrival (we were flying all day Tuesday). {Sidebar… In Italy it took us 15 minutes to get Covid tests with no scheduling. Walked right in and on our way. No wonder they thought a couple days was enough time.}

We scheduled Covid tests for Sunday and could only do PCR since no one was offering rapid tests within Ohio - or at least, nearby.

As we pull up to the window, we are told that, since it is Sunday and the next day is memorial day the lab will get our samples on Tuesday and we’ll have our results on Wednesday (remember, we arrive on Tuesday).

So we declined testing and happened to find the last two Binax Now non-proctored self-tests in the area. We take the tests and both test negative. We submit a negative result to the Binax website (no one has checked anything. - I think it was a literal “not positive” checkbox), get confirmation emails, and upload them to the United website.

They take hers but declined mine for being taken too far outside of the three day window… even though we took them and uploaded same day.

I tried two more times, declined two more times.

So I think… My birthday was a few days before we took the test, I wonder if the automated systems or screeners are picking up on my birthday and rejecting it.

*So I take the email into Mac’s preview app, drag a white box over my date of birth, save, upload.*

Success.

No one stops us at United, no one stops us at customs, no one questions us at all.

After we arrived in Rome I realized I could have literally found a copy of the email on the Internet, put my name and test time in, and uploaded.

And that’s how we got to go on vacation to Italy.

Smart to use a throwaway. And I personally know someone who violated the “don’t access systems” rule. They were very well liked and they were very quickly fired.

I was wondering what the purpose of the oops team was beyond making employees’ lives a little easier. Makes sense that they would set it up as a way to avoid having devs trying to fix friend’s/family member’s problems and risk private info/PII running amok

So… this will be a useless answer for most and incredibly helpful for a few.

The best solution is to know, or befriend, someone who works at Facebook (you’re in the right forum to meet people).

The short: FB has an internal team dedicated to helping friends of employees fix account issues and they work very quickly.

I know, and have personally used, this service a few times and it’s super useful. (Sadly I don’t work for the company so I’m not helpful here.)

So if you know a FB/Meta employee, contact them about the “oops” team.

If you don’t know anyone, there’s a chance someone here could help (it is extra work for them and they’re putting their reputation on the line so think about how you can show/prove you’re a good actor.)

I’m going to guess that this isn’t helpful to your situation right now but perhaps you can use this info to find someone who can help. Good luck!

Only a single anecdote but my wife falls into the category of “I won’t buy from Amazon anymore because it’s probably crap or counterfeit”.

Starting to see the sentiment seeping from the early adopters to the early majority

See the book “Trust me, I’m lying” to see how the US journeyed from ad & attention driven media (yellow journalism) to subscription/brand driven journalism (The New York Times was one of the first with “all the news that’s fit to print”), back to ad/attention driven journalism on steroids (the internet + Google news and Facebook - though less for FB since the algorithm updates).

It’s a great/terrifying book and I’ve personally witnessed the results

Edit: To clarify, I point this out because there was a good 80ish years where journalism was less about grabbing and holding your attention and more about maintaining subscribers. Since it was very hard to maintain subscribers if you just kept throwing click bait and half-accurate news at them, it helped improve their accuracy.

One thing I very much appreciate about the hacker news community are comments like this.

I didn’t read the article but clicked in of the comments “knowing” they be stuffed with Reddit like fury. “How dare they!”

I was wrong… Like usual.

It seems this community is significantly less jump-to-outrage prone than many others (eg. much of Reddit).

We still let the marketing-engineered clickbait headlines slip through (since they are the actual articles’ titles) - such as the title of this post.

But still, some of the least outrage-y responses on the internet.

Thank you Reonxi and thank you HN community.

Edit: spelling (more bloody autocorrect fails)

> Kinda galling to realize that some of the most personal information of millions of people is being guarded by the D's and F's of the industry

I 100% agree.

I also wonder what the solution could be though… Especially for geographies that have lots of more interesting companies to work for.

We could sit here and say “they could pay market rates“ (or even, “they could pay shiploads of cash, benefits, etc”) but, from the little data I gathered from the CTO and others, some of the difficulties are 1. that the problems they have are generally not very interesting because… 2. their risk tolerance is -1000 since 3. innovation & change is seen as - and can pose a very material - risk, and 4. They are a slow and stodgy companies mired in regulations and guided by legal teams* (Also means offering stock/upside underperforms tech companies by a mile)

I’m trying to imagine a scenario where (as a person with plenty of options) I would be interested in joining the health insurance company for longer than a year or two…

Even if they gave me a massive salary, a gorgeous office, a robust team, they would still have massive challenges to give impactful problems to work on without getting mired in internal legal battles and committee reviews.

Having seen several insurers from the inside most of them would need massive internal cultural changes just to hire a handful of A-players and retain them for any reasonable length of time (make that triple true with the pandemic popularizing remote work)*

* A quote from the #3 person at Regence who I worked with: “I love this!” (Re a startup product.) “How do we get it around legal and through procurement?”

Even someone who controlled 1/3 of all revenue made by the business still could be stymied by legal & procurement.

* There is one shining star I could point to… Regence BlueCross BlueShield of the Pacific Northwest. They are owned by a parent company, Cambia, which also has an accelerator, venture arm, and an innovation lab if I remember correctly.

They have solved some of these issues by investing in innovators such as spotlight health to help them solve their business needs. However, I don’t believe (though I have no data) they had a robust internal security team for all the reasons listed above.

(I haven’t had any contact or affiliation with him in about eight years.)

> They can’t keep talent around because they refuse to pay market rates

The former CTO of Blue Shield of California told me back in 2012 (re tech talent):

> “We have the Ds and the Fs of the industry. I mean, who would want to work for a payor (insurance co) in SF?”

(Quoted to the best of my memory… But the first sentence is pretty much verbatim)

Agreed that this is usually true.

Oddly, my wife interviewed with Facebook (~7 years ago), got the “no, but we’ll reach out to you if something comes up“, and 2-3 months later they did. She’s been working there ever since.

So well 99% of the time I would say don’t expect to hear back… my n=1 experience says it’s not impossible.

I quite literally came to the comments to quote this:

> No, it’s about embracing the constraints. They proved to be his true allies

And say pretty much the same thing you did.

Constraints helped them ship by Monday (a seriously admirable feat) but the direct relationships with both the customer (restaurants) and infrastructure (couriers) was what made it a profitable endeavor.

This is very well written out. Thank you.

It seems much of the conflicting arguments about this article are debating more about whether or not vaccine mandates are good/legal/constitutional, rather than seeing that this is a ruling against the method used to deploy the mandate (namely, using an OSHA ETS) and whether or not that is constitutional.

I came here to ask how it was different from OpenBCI.

It might end up slightly cheaper. They use the ADS1299 Analog-to-Digital Converter, which is $40 (DACs are usually one of the largest costs of BCIs). So it seems like the all-in cost won’t be much cheaper than OpenBCI.

Hopefully I’m wrong and someone will correct me because I’d love to see a research-grade BCI for ~$100-$200 (not sure about Muse 2 but my neuroscientist friend called Muse 1 “a fun toy, but still a toy”… sadly that’s the closest I’ve found so far.)

I clicked the link, read the copy, and was laughing/enjoying myself so much that I had to come back to drop a comment.

100% worth the time. This was a wonderful way to start the day.

Thanks for the feedback! I’ll email you directly because the head movement thing sounds really interesting.

Short answer to your question… I don’t/I cheated. I was inspired by my friend who launch the successful Kickstarter “throw trucks with your mind”. His feedback for corm/focus algorithms and training was to group and average a few seconds of data.

So I run my FFT‘s every (doing this from memory, might be slightly off) 50 ms looking back about a half a second. Then run it through the calm, focus, and anxiety algorithms I wrote. Lastly I average over 5 seconds to reduce wild fluctuations/“death spirals” (users freak out mentally when they see calm: 80 -> 0 -> 50 -> 2) and spit that out to be user facing.

So it sort of smooths over blinks/head movement/etc.

At least, I think so. Will DM and thanks for the feedback!

(And I’d love to see the control fire thing - I did something similar where you can levitate, high jump, slow fall, etc. I just suck at/have never really done game design so it stalled out.)

Love the thread!

Been building a bio and neuro feedback controlled "Temple Run" like game that runs entirely in the browser (Web Bluetooth to hook into a Muse EEG and a heart rate monitor, 4 channels running FFTs, WebGL, etc).

I really wanted a fun way to get me to use EEG training for focus and managing anxiety/stress. So... here we are.

Pretty close to Show HN ready. Thinking I might post one if anyone thinks it sounds interesting.

Before we had good EVs (If I remember right electric vehicles at the time had something like 60 miles of range... I might be off, though. That was about 14 years ago)