Hacker News Reader

cwizon Ask HN: Devs/data scis who pivoted to a new career in 30s/40s, what do you do?

Hard science?

cwizon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2024)

  Location: whatever works 4 you (onsite /eu)
  Remote: yes
  Technologies: im looking for advanced stuff in quantum computing, qiskit, quantum ai, or ai + physics intermediately 
  Résumé/CV: https://stillonearth.github.io/

cwizon YC: Requests for Startups

I felt so inclined toward startups in my 20, now in mid 30 I'll just start a GitHub repo if theres interest

cwizon Most of Russia's War Chips Are Made by US and EU Companies (Intel, AMD, STM)

Deep state, who might have though

cwizon Let's Talk About Beacons

My colleagues at Shopster [http://getshopster.com/] are implementing really awesome indoor navigation project with 300+ beacons installed in largest Russian mall. See demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAM4bJst2Jw

And yes, we built custom beacons on top of OpenWRT routers & USB dongles –> hence high frequency updates, high power & no battery dependance. Also we built a mechanism that allows us to update majors/minors/uuids so that no external party can use our beacons.

Battery beacons are only usable for a couple toy usecases in my opinion.

cwizon Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea (2012)

Something clicked in me when I read the title & article: this is all true. I made one travel planner few years ago and decided to open source it some time later, when it become apparent that it's really hard to get decent traction with it: https://github.com/cwiz/GoFree

cwizon Some ideas for native Bitcoin apps

I think there is huge opportunity in decentralising existing business models that are well suitable for p2p.

Think of Uber / AirBNB / etc with no fees and no government power over them.

Another huge opportunity in distributing revenue of these services to peers running the network. This may cause rapid growth & unparalleled fault tolerance.

Third thing that might be disrupting is ability of such services to issue their own coins/stocks, which price is linked to service's revenue. Revenue is then distributed among stock owners, and service can issue such stocks at will without government's approval.

cwizon JPMorgan Says Data Breach Affected 76M Households

In 20+ years with advent of decentralised banking (btc, etc) such stories will be impossible. Decentralised banking will not only affect security but overall money distribution in the world.

cwizon S.F., L.A. threaten Uber, Lyft, Sidecar with legal action

I'm thinking more & more about decentralised p2p bitcoin based uber which cannot be ever shut down or controlled. Now it's becoming apparent that it's what world will soon need.

cwizon Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

Clearly, this:

    1. Limits speed of information distribution

    2. Can be used to filter out specific information

    3. Promotes centralised points of view -> Fewer people decide what is information is valuable

But:

    1. May lead to better quality of information

---

3 facts vs 1 possibility

cwizon Sell HN: Do you have a side project you want to sell?

http://gofree.ru/ – travel metasearch / planner for Russian speaking. Traction included.

nodejs / backbone and lots of goodness

cwizon Ask HN: Any Moscow HNers?

hey! drop me a line at s@indoornavigation.ru

cwizon Hacking Github with Webkit

ты охуенен.

your posts are so entertaining, keep it up

cwizon Why Every Office Should Switch To Walking Desks

What about just exercising and going to gym? Standing to be fit is like staring to scientific papers to be smart.

cwizon Escape from Callback Hell

I find LiveScript's back-calls (<-) very elegant. In fact it makes concurrent code very easy to write and comprehend. Combined with async (https://github.com/caolan/async) it is a pure joy.

As for pure JavaScript, dealing with callbacks is definitely not fun.

cwizon The Pinboard Investment Co-Prosperity Cloud

I'm announcing microcrowdfunding flush-investment platfrom Flushstart. We all have pockets full of change by the end of the day. To participate in Flushstart you you just flush all the change down the toilet and Flushstart employees collect your investments in the sewers. You automatically get equity in all projects listed in Flushstart. I just started the platform by flushing 10 cents.

cwizon Startup uses disruption of Earth's magnetic field for indoor positioning

Whoa :) This is very clever. I've been working on indoor positioning quite a long time already and might give this a try. No WiFi -> no extra WiFi hardware costs -> widespread use

This technology might disrupt indoor advertisement.

cwizon Ask HN: Rejected from YC? Who are you?

we are two 22 years old guys from Moscow: 1) me, currently one of the first engineers at vc-backed startup. prior that worked in russian space corporation on GLONASS programme. Graduated Moscow Aviation Institute with speciality in navigation systems. 2) my buddy, who co-founded executive photo company mnmf.ru which profitable from day zero. Prior that was responsible for marketing at real-estate company.

We're building mall app with indoor positioning.

cwizon Ask HN: Rejected from YC? Who are you?

Rejected. We build mobile mall app with indoor positioning based on wifi fingerprinting. App allows user to find what he wants inside of mall, and retailers get ability to analyze user's routes and push location aware ads. Think of point inside with better accuracy. Yc is awesome opportunity but not the only one so rejection is not painful at all.

cwizon Google Maps Floor Plans

No. There are ways to do indoor positioning indoors: WiFi fingerprinting and supersonic marks.

Triangulation (trilateration) the way it's used in GPS will not work indoors because it's impossible to build accurate signal propagation model – model would be extremely complicated.

On the other hand signal propagation model can be learned via sampling actual signals in different spots on site. There are two ways to sample signals: 1) direct 2) indirect (via statistical models like SLAM)

Positioning can be done by comparing signal strengths from model and actual device and feeding them to some statistical positioning algorithm like particle filter or LSE. These algorithms use not only signal strengths but accelerometer, gyro and magnetic sensors for movement model. Fingerprinting techniques can provide up to 30 cm accuracy.

Huge win of WiFi fingerprinting is that it works on existing consumer-level hardware. But the downside is that you cannot scan WiFi in iOS public API.

There is less accurate way to position user indoors using supersonic marks – and it works on any existing phone.

Companies who do indoor positioning: WiFiSlam, Qubulus, WalkBase, Google, Nokia and we (applying to yc :). Some provide APIs, some are in stealth mode and Google has indoor positioning in some US and Japanese malls and airports.

Personally I think that there is huge opportunity for location-aware apps for malls, airports, parking lots, hospitals, etc and it has not been tackled much by anyone yet.