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Comment by snakeyjake | Hacker News Reader

Given the.. qualities.. of people involved in the NFT space the organizers probably bought a bunch of UV-C lamps off alibaba because they were cheap and looked cool-- doing absolutely no research and with no regard for others.

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There have been reports of UV-C bulbs being repackaged as "party lights" and sold on eBay/Amazon/etc. So it is possible they had no idea.

Yup, never ever buy lasers / UV light equipment from Amazon. Shit's dangerous and they don't go through any real regulation.

You often get class 3B lasers being sold as 3R which is extremely dangerous. I opted to pay a lot more for a green laser for astronomy purposes on a legit website then buy dirt cheap on Amazon because I don't want to blind/injure myself or others.

It's the kind of thing a competent A/V staffer would think of because the event's insurance would have required more credible sourcing. Given the nature of the crowd, I wouldn't be surprised to learn they had no legal support or insurance.

related: https://youtu.be/CpRMud6EFtE

Which is why you hire an AV company to put on an event like this, and not just pay Bill to show up with a truck full of electronic crap.

I think that is 100% true. I had a friend keep his grow lights on a little too long, a little too often, because they looked cool. I got instant migraines when I walked in his room.

Grow lights use UV-A, UV-B.

UV-C is used to sterilize stuff since it damages DNA/RNA. It's toxic to plants too.

Unfortunately, I wouldn’t expect the average guy to know how to tell whether a UV bulb is safe (regular non-quartz glass helps a lot) or that dangerous ones are sold without warnings.

Average guy here, I have no clue what you're talking about.

quartz is mostly transparent to UV radiation, glass is not

Ah so one makes UV light just an innocuous, annoying purple and the other makes it like the inside of a tanning bed.

If you're talking about old-school fluorescent-tube black lights, the bulb type designation will have a -BLB suffix, like F15T8-BLB for a typical 15-watt tube, as well as a visibly dark phosphor. A germicidal tube would be G15T8, and have a clear quartz envelope with no phosphor coating.

All bets are off if you're using LEDs.

The "average guy" shouldn't be doing technical stage production.

You hire trained professionals for this kind of thing. There are literally entire companies who specialize in putting together these kinds of events safely, every single day.

A professional stage lighting designer or theatrical electrician would absolutely know that this is a risk.

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