Thanks for the write-up! Im curious, how did you promote ph launch? Did you have a mailing list to let everyone know? Where did the support come from or was it just through luck?
No list. As I said in the post, I had very little audience. Most of the success is due to me randomly messaging my Twitter contacts and asking for their support. I messaged ahead of time (maybe a few hours before?) just so it wasn't out of the blue. Everyone agreed. Some were already customers (I made some sales before the launch) so they left honest reviews of the product.
I think the other part of this being successful was the giveaway tweet, plus all the friends who just wanted to support me. I am really thankful they did!
I was looking up air quality monitors but can't seem to find any on amazon with a calibration certificate that will accurately measure 0.3 micro particles. Am I the only one who thinks this is a great opportunity for a smart product with an app that has the features of a professional air quality monitor and simple UI / UX? If such product exists, does anyone know where I can find it?
Their site is simple but it works great.
I "installed" my outdoor sensor by laying it on my desk inside and plugging it in.
Will move outside when fires end.
With the recent California fires, I've been looking for a decent option. Unfortunately the Elgato Eve sensor is no longer sold, and the few other consumer products still hover in the $100+ range with poor reviews.
PurpleAir sells an indoor sensor, but it appears to be limited release and somewhat 3D printed.
https://www.purpleair.com/
Having both, I'd say that the indoor sensor is not worth it. It doesn't have both sensors so it isn't equipped to test them against each other. I do like the outdoor sensor though.
Why do you need an accurate measurement for consumer air quality monitoring? I believe even a DIY arduino project with cheap optical dust sensor, like PPD42NS or GP2Y1010AU0F, would be enough.
Why use a measurement device at all? Your nose is quite good enough, as long as it's neither clogged nor "calibrated" to city air. Putting a dust mask with a P3+carbon filter on for an hour or so tends to fix the latter.
My heart goes out to them but I hate seeing Gofundme campaigns used for such purposes. All the time I see campaigns to cover someones medical bills or accident costs. No, we have insurance for that! What happened in California was a natural disaster and will be covered by what every home owner in Cali is forced to pay out every month in mandatory tax for such cathaclism. We as a society will be in very dengerous spot when people start ignoring obtaining reasonable insurance and just hope for successful Gofoundme campaign when things go south.
Your insurance coverage can vanish in a moment. A current anecdote..
I live in a neighborhood of ~80 small lots/homes a few miles west of Palo Alto. Since Oct.1, nine of our neighbors have had their fire insurance policies terminated immediately on receipt of the mailed notices. Most of the nine had their policies in place for >15 years. Not like they were dodging the need for insurance.
Gofundme has its uses. I hope it brings at lease a small measure of ease to the Godbout family.
from the perspective of a person that lives in a country with a single-payer healthcare system, that covers pretty much everybody, it is amazing to see Americans use GoFundMe for medical bills.
The fact that you can become completely bankrupt by getting cancer or any other "expensive" ailment is just... Ridiculous.
GoFundMe is a symptom of a much larger problem, not the problem itself.
It's also inherently unfair - if you aren't good at marketing, sorry, you don't get to recover from the disaster as well as your neighbor does.
Let alone room for other issues - English level, technological understanding, hell maybe you're just too ugly to put your face in a GoFundMe video and garner sympathy.
I'm with grandparent, this is boring dystopia shit.
Edit: more thoughts - the amount of "recovery" you get is entirely a popularity contest, and has nothing to do with need or really even the value of property lost. Tick enough arbitrary marketing boxes and you could even profit. It's a remarkably shitty thing.
Insurance doesn't always cover the cost. This is because there is severe demand for builders and building materials after a fire; but also because building codes and regulations have got tighter which pushes up costs. Not everyone includes that in their insurance.
> Wildfires are like hurricanes. Thousands of homes must be rebuilt at the same time when there is not enough building materials or contractors to go around. This, of course, leads to skyrocketing price increases in labor and materials, making the replacement cost of a home destroyed by the wildfire 50 percent or greater than what it would've been before the fires. Assuming you have enough structural coverage, you are entitled to receive the cost to rebuild your home at today's materials and labor costs.
[...]
> It will pay the cost to rebuild what you had up to the insured amount if you insured your home for 100 percent of its estimated replacement cost as computed by your agent. Then, if you have an "extended replacement cost" endorsement, it will pay an additional 25 percent, 50 percent, or more of that insured amount, depending on with which company you are insured.1 Finally, if your home is a little older and building construction laws have tightened (such as making your home more earthquake resistant), thereby dramatically increasing the replacement costs, it will typically pay another 10 percent and possibly up to 100 percent additional for those costs, depending on whether you purchased "supplemental building ordinance" coverage.
> For example, if you insured your home for its estimated replacement cost of $500,000, but because of the cost increases following a disaster like a wildfire, the replacement cost is $800,000 for what you had, and an additional $200,000 for added costs from building ordinances, you need $1 million to rebuild. Assume you had purchased the optional extended replacement cost endorsement of 150 percent and an optional ordinance endorsement for 125 percent, you could collect up to an additional $375,000 for a grand total of $875,000. Still short of what you needed, but considerably better than the $500,000 original coverage.
lol, no other market is more regulated than insurance, except maaaybe utilities. you can almost think of them as a financial utility because they are given special state licenses to allow them to collude on setting prices, which they basically have to do because of how extensively regulated they are.
I am not an expert on anything but I can give the answer a stab. Let us make many assumptions:
Say plankton dies off, say animals eating plankton die, say humans eating those animals now have less food. Say all the fish die and we are reduced to land-based food. Now we have more space competing for farm land, we have to clear forest. Clearing adds to CO2 emissions, construction, more emissions, less CO2 being taken out. It's clear how this is all one giant feedback loop. Less biodiversity, more overabundance of something else, which leads to less consumption of something else which leads to collapse of ecosystems which leads to use trying to patch things up and doing even more harm.
Just zoom out and think about things that consume things and how that loops back directly to humans, environment, overproduction, overuse and eventually unsustainable usage of resources until there are none left.
I asked my Japanese wife for her opinion on this matter and she thinks the reason Japanese in general are more content is because of the lack of drive created by class inequality. Generally speaking, Japanese people are fairly well taken care of by the social systems and there is not a lot of flaunted wealth unlike in the west. Most Japanese probably see no need to strive and work too hard because their life is okay by most standards. Food is great, healthcare won't make one go bankrupt, good service and there's that whole culture of fitting in "the nail that sticks out must be hammered in". With the lack of visual class divide, younger people just don't see the point of working their asses off. They do it at first because that's what they are taught but once introduced to the very rigid and stressful work environment, there is little hope of advancement. I think the depression and suicide is a result of being content - manifesting in frustration and ultimately being unable to deal with the mundane of every day life (combined with other factors like frustration with work and or lack of partners).
I tend to agree. I have lived here for a short time but you get a sense of this just by being around people.
I think there's a huge misconception about the conformity in Japan. Yes there is obvious conformity on the surface from a cursory glance, but then how do you explain the innovation that comes out of there? They're super inventive when it comes to Anime, food, design, and technology and it all stands at stark odds with how foreigners perceive them as conformist.
I am a fan of anime but I think there's a lot of tepid, derivative or uncreative anime being created that Westerners aren't completely exposed to.
For example, there are six or seven anime released in the past few years where the protagonist went to sleep/died and then woke up in a video game world, either in a game they played IRL or simply somehow were transported to the world of a video game or a world that behaves as if it is a video game.
They range from inventive and interesting to tedious rip-offs.
Isekai (parallel world?) of various sorts generally come from light novels, which, as I understand it, are amateur novellas aimed at teens and youths with interests in fantasy and subjects typically found in anime. The popular ones get picked up by production companies or pushed by the publisher to be adapted into manga or anime. Usually just the first few books in a series, as a promotional thing i guess.
I think publishers hold contests to find which writers will get their stories serialized and at least according to 4chan isekai stories are banned from those contests now for being too uncreative. So people just posted their stories online and some still got picked up by publishers to get light novelized!
Is that any different than the 10 of the last 15 marvel movies basically being basically exactly the same?
Heck let's take western indie games where a large percentage of all indie games are yet another smash brothers clone or a metroidvania clone. There's probably at most 3 more genres that make up the majority of titles
In other words that there is tons of derivative stuff is not even remotely unique to Japan.
There's tons of anime that doesn't make it out of Japan (or used to be) as well of tons of manga that's seriously creative. Walk through a Village Vanguard store for example.
No need to be defensive. There's a ton of interesting and creative anime that does make it out of Japan as well[0], but as with any mainstream media, the anime industry is optimized for commerce and not art, so Sturgeon's Law tends to apply. Anyone with a Crunchyroll account, for instance, notices pretty quickly how much breadth and how little depth there is to anime.
[0]recommended: Stein's Gate, Psycho Pass, FLCL, Serial Experiments Lain, Tatami Galaxy, Pop Team Epic, Cowboy Bebop, Akame Ga Kill, Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt
I don't see it as defensive. I see it rather as "other bashing". Claiming Japanese anime has this quality of much of it being clones of other stuff can only be interpreted 2 ways
1. This quality is unique or more common in Japanese anime
2. This is a feature of all media of which Japanese anime is one
If the answer is #2 then there was no reason to say it. It would be like saying "water is wet in Japan". Of course water is wet everywhere so no point in even bringing it up.
If it's #1 then we need proof that Japanese anime has more clones than other media from other countries. I think that proof will be hard to find. Crunchyroll is not Japan.
My point was not that various anime is ripping off plots or themes from other bodies of art outside of anime and is thus derivative, but rather that a fair amount of anime is ripping off its themes from the superior examples of the genre.
There is a lot of anime I would rate much higher than pretty much any other narratives presented in other media formats including my native Hollywood.
Maybe that's a side effect from the sheer number and low production cost of Anime.
In my opinion when the Japanese are inventive they have some really out-ther stuff, which is a sign they are really extending themselves in creativity.
The reason I still enjoy anime as an adult is that I find the stand-out productions to go far beyond the intellectual and physical boundaries of western productions so I definitely agree with you.
One of the aspects of non-American narratives I enjoy is the greater likelihood of a tragic or bitter-sweet ending.
I agree that functioning social systems and reduced inequality seem to have a huge positive impact on quality of life compared to the US. In addition to health care (which you mentioned), the quality of public schools also seems to be much better on average than in the US. And unlike in the US, where the quality of schools can vary dramatically by the neighborhood you live in (i.e. Palo Alto vs. East Palo Alto in the Bay Area), the quality is fairly consistent between richer areas and poorer areas.
Houses are also much more affordable to own in Japan. Interest rates are around 1%. Tokyo is doing a good job of keeping up with demand, and a single family home in Tokyo can be purchased for under $500k compared to millions of dollars in SF or NY.
These things matter when it comes to contentment. I may not be rich, but I can own my own home, my kids can get a good education, crime is very low, we don't have to worry about going bankrupt if we have a medical emergency, there are amazing public parks nearby that I can visit, good service wherever I ago, etc.
Can you and/or your wife share your opinions on mental health in japanese society? Are people with mental illnesses looked down upon like in most of the world? Are psychologists/therapists a thing? etc.
So we should expect less technological inventions, less creative solutions from this generation of the Japanese? I believe high Conscientiousness combined with high levels of Neuroticism is a common/promoted personality type over there.
Claims like these make privacy-focused efforts less valuable, and I wish people wouldn't make them.
What value is there in taking care to store biometric data only locally, in a separate chip inaccessible even to the OS, if people will simply claim it's equivalent to keeping a remote database of millions of faces?
People will be much less likely to make those claims if you clearly state where the data is being stored. This article + their project page doesn't mention anything about privacy.
People need to ask the question before making assumptions. In the case of Apple, they said it directly in the presentation of FaceID as well as TouchID IIRC. Yet people made these claims anyway. For this project, they also state it clearly on the page:
> Are my images being stored on Google servers?
> No. All the training is happening locally on your device.
Where is it clearly stating that? I couldn't find anything in the linked article + the github repo + teachablemachine.withgoogle.com
But I do agree people need to ask the question before making assumptions. Sadly, the two popular mindsets is either to not think about privacy at all, or believe that everything is infringing on your privacy.
Ah, I didn't get that far due to it requesting the webcam. I'd prefer that they state it before the request, but an FAQ at the start of the project is good enough.
Facebook beat them to it... that's the whole reason for tagged images imo. Then they can relate identities with each other and with exif gps data to track their movements over time.
HN discussions tend to devolve into rants about privacy. There are a lot of repeated discussions that occur here. They overwhelm the discussion about the actual technology
Also, my own personal privacy is less secure if it's a relative inconvenience for employers. If everyone but me gives up their privacy then there's more pressure on me to follow suit.
The argument even doubles back on itself. If these comments aren't interesting to you... don't read them. Embrace tree-style collapsible comments.
You can learn lots of interesting things by invading people's privacy.
I responded to the argument you linked. You're avoiding a more interesting discussion on the topic. Push the [-] button and move on. Your comment is blatantly hypocritical:
"Every time X is updated people complain about X; those people ignore the details of the update."
"Every time people complain about X other people complain about them complaining about X; those people ignore the details of the complaint."
That's because the privacy implication of the technology should be part of the discussions on the technology... technology is not neutral, the way its used and the privacy implications are significant.
I am pretty sure that Apple does not save your image data in any database. Apple is really trying to differentiate itself on privacy.
Also, I don't think that this sends any data to Google, since it trains the neural net in the browser. You could even verify this yourself by looking at the source code.
Are you saying there are people who meditate and can free their mind of any thought? I tried this "exercise" and could not "not think" for the life of me.
0.5% conversion on email? Wow.. you are doing something wrong. My clients have like a 15-21% conversion via email but it probably depends on what you're selling. So, what are you selling?
