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Comment by klintcho | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to start another "SF vs Miami/Austin rest of the US" but! An awesome thing in the Bay-Area is all the insane stuff you get on eBay and Craigslist. I bought a Velodyne VLP-16 LIDAR for my mobile robot side project and met up with a guy in SF. He had a startup that ended up using vision only so they sold off their LIDARs.

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Was that guy also building self landing rockets by any chance?

> An awesome thing in the Bay-Area is all the insane stuff you get on eBay and Craigslist.

I don't browse craiglist much, but I buy a bunch of retro computing / telecom / lab equipment stuff on ebay and the coolest stuff is always local pickup only on the west coast I swear.

This varies by industry of course... the Bay Area is definitely the best place to score computing and electronics related stuff. But southern CA has way more aerospace stuff, New England (especially CT and MA) have a lot of precision instrumentation and manufacturing equipment, and for stuff like robots and heavy duty metalworking machinery you really want to be in the Rust Belt.

I haven't found much precision instrumentation or manufacturing stuff on MA craigslist. The MIT Swap Meet used to be THE place for that thing but the past couple years I've gone its all junk. I wonder if there is a new venue to find those things?

I've gotta' be honest, this post makes me miss my time living in the Bay Area, Los Altos specifically.

I don't think I'll ever live anywhere else again where one neighbor couldn't fit his new McLaren 720s in his 70's ranchburger garage after a brief drizzle or my other neighbor who no joke - had a red VW bug with a bumper sticker that read "Ham Radio Saves Lives".

When I read the headline, the first thing I thought was "definitely in California." Not even a question.

It's funny that you say this because kindof "the" people who make jet powered cars are in Florida, not San Francisco: https://www.elainelarsen.com/

Yeah, but they're not going to use a Beetle are they? :)

For ex: Jet Dragster Competition

https://youtu.be/8voAgRcKfaU?t=562

The sort of thing that makes me love America (yes I know EU people they feature them in other countries).

One of my favorite pastimes during COVID has been browsing the "free" section of the sfbay CL. Some truly weird and confusing things on there.

Now I have to ask, what kind of side project requires such a high quality sensor?

I think particular robot side projects, if you can afford it, make use of LIDAR partly because it makes dealing with things much easier than the amount of time invested attempting a vision-based system.

It's been a long time but I remember lidar being common (or at least a divide between rich/poor college clubs) a decade ago in competitions like http://www.igvc.org/

Oh definitely. I brought one of the first stereoscopic camera robots there. It was very clear we werent in the same financial support league but we did well I think our second year on there.

Miami people don’t have the same hobbies as the rest of the country does. Shipping cross-country is the only way I’ve found to sustain the hobbies I picked up in other parts of the country.

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