Ah this is so refreshing! I'm glad to see something completely different in the CS job ads sector. And Pentagon, Arlington, VA as a location? Oooff, every single one who grew up with X-Files would be excited about that!
Salary is average at best, completely agree, but the other major bummer I can call out is this:
> This position is subject to pre-employment and random drug testing
This is such an outdated, self-limiting, and practically barbaric requirement modern days! Can you imagine the amount talent they are blindly passing on.?
I would even dare to bring up the Bill Gate's (yes that guy!) alleged talk in Saudi Arabia [1], which goes as something along these lines: "..if you’re not fully utilizing half the talent in the country, you’re not going to get close to the goal you have set for yourself..."
[1] Bill Gate's precedent was about the issue that is an order of magnitude more severe/significant than a drug testing: women's rights, but I find the analogy quite applicable and illustrative here
was my first thought as well, but after watching the video it looks like it's something you can quickly setup AFTER the incident. To deal with the aftermath I guess?..
An EMP pulse weapon would be detonated hundreds of miles about the ground, how do you figure out the wind direction where that device was detonated after the internet, commercial radio stations, etc have all been knocked offline (assuming your personal electronics survived)
Disaster Radio. Does one need an FCC ham license to own/operate an endpoint? What are the frequencies? After some light poking on the website I don't see any info on that. Love the idea though.
there is also this: https://www.nycmesh.net/ , somewhat related and can be used as a back up information/communication source
The ESP8266 is a wifi chip, so almost certainly OK to operate without a license unless you're doing something really bizarre with antenna gain to get above the 36 dBm EIRP threshold.
LoRa can run in any band you want, but it's almost universally deployed in ISM bands as well, 315/433 or 868/915 MHz. I don't think I've ever seen a LoRa chipset that would push enough power to exceed part-15 regs.
HOWEVER, to be strictly legal, a part-15 device actually needs to be tested and certified thereas. Otherwise the parts can only be sold as a kit and stuff, which is how pretty much all lora stuff is sold right now. And you'd be hard pressed to piss anyone off enough to care.
> Otherwise the parts can only be sold as a kit and stuff
Yeah. Disaster Radio does not look like a "kit" at all. Not for "an average user" at least. I'd be cautious building and operating hardware that can potentially get me in trouble with authorities.
Still great general idea though, to build a solar-powered kit that's easy to setup and operate, a kit that makes sure there is a "plug-and-play" solution in case of a disaster (natural or not), kit that also delegates legal responsibility to the "creator"/manufacturer.
Okay, I should've been clearer about my initial post, that it's breathtakingly unlikely for anyone to get in trouble doing this.
Look at the unmitigated chaos on CB for a sense of how much the FCC feels like enforcing anything on the unlicensed bands. Probably 95% of CBers are running above-legal power, many of them by _several orders of magnitude_, and behold, the field in which the FCC grows its fucks, it is barren.
Interesting, so how is it different from similar projects, e.g nycmesh.net, I mentioned above? Is it a promo for the custom hardware design initiative? hardware that's more modular, cheaper, focused than traditional brands?
NYC Mesh and similar networks use point-to-point relatively high bandwidth links (e.x. Ubiquiti radios commonly used by WISPs)
Disaster.radio uses LoRa which is very low bandwidth and typically omnidirectional antennas. It only uses WiFi to connect users’ “terminal” devices to the node within a short range.
Yes! To expand on this a bit, disaster.radio locally hosts web apps, e.g. a vector tile map of the local area, and serves them up over WiFi to local devices with a reasonable bandwidth, then uses the very low bandwidth of LoRa to share points on the map added by users over long distances (e.g. where you can get water, food, etc).
disaster.radio is not a replacement to a existing internet infrastructure like NYC Mesh. Setting up a high bandwidth mesh network is a lot of work. Each node needs a non-trivial amount of power (enough to make solar hard) and nodes generally need line of sight which requires good mounting locations and planning.
We, the creators of disaster.radio, actually also run a small wifi-based mesh network https://peoplesopen.net/ and the idea for disaster.radio came out of frustration with difficulty of mounting wifi nodes (finding interested people in good locations, then negotiating with landlords for permission to mount on rooftops and running ethernet cable for PoE into building, then finding another location within line of sight and repeating the process). We thought: What if we could make a "mesh throwie" where installation was as easy as throwing it on a roof (and maybe strapping it to something).
Oh my, important internet points! Such a treasure is being taken away haha
On a more serious note, who cares? Your comment is a valid criticism, there is a multitude of reasons for why some decided to downvote without leaving a comment, but again, why should you care?
Refreshingly, HN is not an echo chamber (not gonna work if you are seeking any sort of validation), there are a lot of people who do not share your views, as well as people who do. whether or not to freak out about it is up to you (I wouldn't)
I care because the reason I comment is to contribute to the conversation, and if someone thinks I'm doing the opposite I'd like to know why. Usually when I ask this I get a constructive answer instead of getting the question itself downvoted, as happened here. And the habit of asking why one downvotes is something I picked up here, and only really use here, for that reason.
> one which went away a little bit after after the early 2000s dot-com crash
You have at least 15 years of experience and can't get an offer of 120K in Chicago? I don't believe that it’s plausible. Well, unless it's not a "high-tech" job you are talking about, meaning that your comment is not relevant to the article or discussion at all?
If you are a software developer (or data-scientist, or anything that qualifies as "high-tech"), it is very strange that after 15 years your skills did not appreciate or improved enough to qualify for a 120K offer.
I haven't looked in Chicago since 2004, and I'm unlikely to try again until 2024. There's more to moving than just the job.
Your post came across as vaguely insulting. A company that maxes out under my minimum isn't looking for someone with a higher level of skill--or even a median level of skill. A lot of these companies ask for the Moon, and want to pay for river rocks, then don't list salary range in their advertisements. If I can't weed them out quickly, they will waste more of my time than I care to give up.
It's not about securing an offer, it's about finding a company that isn't both tight-fisted and greedy. Now that I have left already, why would I expend the extra effort to find a Midwestern-based job that pays well, when other regions are falling over themselves to make even new graduates rich?
Midwestern companies can only attract local talent, and that talent is fleeing to cities that don't pay peanuts. I would move back, if companies there could raise the average pay of their tech employees, and maybe also get a bit more sun during the winter.
"parts of the main video that are ads" - well, i'm not sure what those are. Is it something that happens when they record a program from a TV and then upload that video to youtube without removing TV ads?
Imagine a Youtube video where the host takes a break to read off an advertisement and that you'll get a 10% discount if you use their code during the checkout process. And then they resume with their content.
They often will pre-record these segments with a consistent "now with a quick word about our sponsors" jingle which can be statically detected and removed from the video.
It means things like sponsor spots where the YouTuber starts talking about some random mobile game or VPN provider you can tell they don't really care about
"as knowledge approaches zero, money approaches infinity", also to rephrase: as knowledge approaches infinity, money approaches zero, - sounds like industry vs academia salaries?
I might be paranoid a bit - I'm skeptical about "you can pick your location" feature. And generally I have a very little trust in US-based VPN service providers.
No matter the location, they'll keep logs forever for the gov or some other equally unreliable entity.
Childish website. Flack Friday is crucial for retail, economic growth and beneficial for the consumers as with larger movement of goods, margins are dropping. As a matter of fact it also carriers a sentimental vibe with a hint of a tradition.
I only see some straw man anti-arguments that don't really explain why black Friday or consumer driven economies are bad (hint: they are not)
EDIT: looks like I overreacted by taking the OPs intent seriously. It turns out to be just a landing page for referrals? Oh the irony.
Yep. Let’s consume consume and endlessly consume and Trash the planet.
US is already the largest producer of greenhouse emissions considering its population. We also consume a crazy amount of energy per capita and not much of our garbage gets recycled.
Sure mindless consumption might be good for GDP but it isn’t great for the planet.
Salary is average at best, completely agree, but the other major bummer I can call out is this:
> This position is subject to pre-employment and random drug testing
This is such an outdated, self-limiting, and practically barbaric requirement modern days! Can you imagine the amount talent they are blindly passing on.?
I would even dare to bring up the Bill Gate's (yes that guy!) alleged talk in Saudi Arabia [1], which goes as something along these lines: "..if you’re not fully utilizing half the talent in the country, you’re not going to get close to the goal you have set for yourself..."
[1] Bill Gate's precedent was about the issue that is an order of magnitude more severe/significant than a drug testing: women's rights, but I find the analogy quite applicable and illustrative here