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Author of startyourownisp.com here. Your experience is unfortunate and definitely not unique, but also not universal or I would say even the norm for WISPs. I'm personally involved in running a few different ISPs in rural parts of the U.S. and Mexico. In all cases we are providing 100mbps+ service with <20ms latency to most of the Internet.

Related in both cases. SYOISP describes what I, as a somewhat opinionated author, believe to be the absolute minimum amount of information required to build a business that can be called an ISP. To the extent that the companies involved in meshcenter.org and also Starry are ISPs, there is definitely overlap.

> I read somewhere that 40% of restaurants started by people with no previous industry experience go belly up within 5 years? Something like that. I imagine one could easily spend $400,000 setting up a restaurant and working 14 hour days and ultimately not be successful

Absolutely agree with this and everything you said here. I think the only thing I see differently is that while someone should have some relevant experience before starting an ISP (or any business) is that it doesn't necessarily have to be networking. For example, some of the biggest challenges I've seen WISPs face as they try to grow are: obtaining lease agreements for wireless relay sites, hiring and training technicians in large numbers, and in logistics around keeping stuff in stock that they need to grow. Someone with experience from a different industry in some of those areas might do just as well as someone with networking experience.

EDIT TO ADD: One of things I find kind of difficult to communicate with people who are interested in it is that it's just another business, and doesn't really have any better or worse odds of succeeding beyond a few years and making money than any other business, including restaurants. People sometimes seem surprised that you can make money at this, but, of course you can! You can also make money running a taco truck or building custom furniture. But you can also lose a lot of money and time.

There's a little bit of that in there. Surprisingly, in the U.S. at least, there's not much of a gap between being a legal business entity (LLC, corp) and being able to be an ISP. You don't have to log much of anything (unless you're doing voice services as well). You do have to be able to intercept customer traffic without going on site physically in order to comply with law enforcement requests.

But as someone who is not a lawyer and has no business giving legal advice the best I can do is suggest that you talk to a real lawyer.

Author here. This is definitely something some WISPs are worried about. It's likely that Starlink will take a lot of the most rural customers. WISPs can also be very successful in more suburban environments, and can speeds much higher than Starlink can provide in suburbia (300-500mbps) at a lower cost, so there will probably be a place for WISPs at least until there is no gap between fiber availability and Starlink as the best option.

Also, a lot of WISPs have started running fiber in rural areas, so that's another way they can stay relevant.

Author here. I see your posts often and have a lot of respect for you as someone who obviously has a deeper knowledge of networking than I probably every will. That being said I don't really agree that a person necessarily needs a ton a networking or even any technical background to start a WISP, any more than they necessarily need a ton of experience as a cook to start a restaurant. They definitely need employees or advisors who have that experience, but like you allude to here probably no one can have all of the knowledge to so it themselves upfront.

Also I've also seen a lot of WISPs with a myriad of problems as they grow from a few dozen to a few hundred customers, many of them are able to make that transition, fix their problems, and either grow or be acquired. This seems basically the same as any industry - if everyone waited until they knew exactly what they're doing no one would start anything.

All of this said, starting a WISP isn't for everyone. I talk to a lot of people who are in the early stages of starting an ISP, and often my best, honest advice is that it's not a great idea in their situation.

Hi folks, author of startyourownisp.com here. Not sure why we hit the front page today, but happy to be here! I'll try to hang around and answer questions for the next few hours. Thanks!

This really is a great thing about living in Utah with young kids (one of the states mentioned in the article with laws explicitly protecting parents from these randos.)

In my neighborhood the street is literally full of neighborhood kids almost every day, ranging from 2-3 years old to teens, out riding bikes and playing games. There's a park a few blocks away that my kids (3yo-10yo) walk or bike to unsupervised.

Obviously as a parent you still worry - for me I worry more about someone getting hit by a car than being abducted - but it's nice to know at least that child services isn't going to show up just because the kids are out playing.

For some context, in case, like me, you don't recognize the author by name:

> Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie... is a Nigerian writer whose works range from novels to short stories to nonfiction. She was described in The Times Literary Supplement as "the most prominent" of a "procession of critically acclaimed young anglophone authors [which] is succeeding in attracting a new generation of readers to African literature", particularly in her second home, the United States. [1]

From the article (last paragraph) that I think sums it up nicely:

> I have spoken to young people who tell me they are terrified to tweet anything, that they read and re-read their tweets because they fear they will be attacked by their own. The assumption of good faith is dead. What matters is not goodness but the appearance of goodness. We are no longer human beings. We are now angels jostling to out-angel one another. God help us. It is obscene.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimamanda_Ngozi_Adichie

GPs second point still holds - the laptop scans for SSID, not BSSID. If all you have is SSID you can't get to location using Google's database. At most you could use it as a data point to connect someone's laptop to a location you already know.

An easy way around this would be to leave your wireless SSID on it's default (or set it to 'Linksys').

You could probably get pretty far with LibreOffice Impress.

I usually use Google Drive for this kind of stuff (specifically the Drawing app.)

It seems like the solution most institutions land on for this kind of thing is just a first come first serve sign up list. Kids who attended the school the previous year, and kids who have siblings currently attending the school, get first priority for open slots. The rest of the slots are first come first serve. This is how my kid's school, a charter school, works.

This is basically my feeling as well. I would prefer that we (at least in the U.S.) focus on making high school much much better, to the point that fewer people have any need to go to college/university. And then, if we still need to, figure out what to do about University.

(Saying this as someone who never finished college/university, largely because I was trying to pay for it myself and couldn't make it work.)

I know HN loves to hate on touchscreens in cars but I don't really get it. Both cars I own and almost every car I've rented in the last few years (that's quite a few) has had a touchscreen. This is pretty much always how it works: 1) The most used functions have physical buttons and knobs, often on both the steering wheel and the center console 2) Touchscreen is used for uncommonly done things, like adding new Bluetooth connections and adjusting radio settings 3) If the vehicle is moving there are limits on touchscreen use (like the touchscreen will refuse to work after X clicks, or disallow some functions, or both.)

This seems ... fine.

I mean, that's also true of hacking game mods as a kid vs. actual programming for money as an adult. But many professional programmers got their start by just playing around with computers as a kid.

Our generation had distractions, too. TV, for example. I don't know the direct answer to your question but at least part of it is that 'not-forcing' your kid in to programming means they might just never be in to programming. My oldest is at least kind of in to programming (and also plays a lot of Minecraft and watches a lot of YouTube) my youngest two have shown zero interest in programing, but have interests of their own.

On paper I'm the type of person who ought to be interested in a cybertruck but I'm finding myself a lot more interested in the Ford F-150 Lightning.

GPs quote specifically calls out Mormonism, though, which is what piqued my attention. Mormonism absolutely does have those things.

> "A core set of beliefs, agreed upon among their followers".

What is the core set of beliefs agreed upon by Woke adherents?

As a Mormon[1], this is interesting. Not because I disagree, necessarily, I certainly see the similarity between Wokeness and religion. But I think an anthropologist would see a difference. At the heart of the experience of being a Mormon (and presumably other religions, though I'm most familiar with this one) is belief in a Prophet (capital P) and a collection of scripture. If you ask any Mormon who the Prophet is, they'll tell you, and they'll all give the same answer. So, who is the prophet of Woke, and what are the scriptures?

1 Culturally, at least, if not really religiously. I'm about as much of a Mormon as Larry David is a Jew.

EDIT: the article linked does partially answer my question:

> There is what we could think of as a triple-Testament tome, consisting of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, and Ibram Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist. A box set of the three would take its place on coffeetables and mantlepieces nationwide.

I recently had an experience kind of like this. I run a website about a kind of niche topic. I got a call from someone at a FAANG one day working in a similar space who wanted to chat about it. I get these calls pretty regularly and agreed, always happy to chat about it. While she was showing me some of what they were working on it started to look very familiar, and I realized that a lot of the ideas had been copied from my site. In some cases they had literally copy/pasted my content. I mentioned this to her and she got uncomfortable and admitted to something like "yeah we took a lot of inspiration from your work." Frankly I don't care that much, I put the info out there to be used and use it they did! But attribution (or an acquisition offer) would have been nice.

Amazon app already has this built in, btw. Most furniture type items have a "view in your room" button that launches an AR viewer.

He's talking about all the stuff to set up to actually watch the stuff you pirate. Like, on a TV, from your couch, using a remote, without fussing with an HDMI cable to your laptop every time. Or setting up your kids / SO to watch on a tablet, phone, etc. Just getting the files without getting caught is only like a quarter of the battle.

Something I've been wondering about - are your goggles stereoscopic, and does the drone have two cameras? I've (very, very briefly) looked in to FPV stuff but quickly get lost in marketing stuff that doesn't seem to clearly indicate if stereoscopic equipment is available.

I've been helping some cities recently to price out the cost of broadband projects. Cities often have some assets (property, access to fiber, sometimes access to wireless spectrum) that can make building a broadband network feasible. I'd love to chat with anyone interested in doing this in their city - email in my profile.

Google Docs app has this built in as well, at least on Android. If you hit + to add a new doc one of the options is Scan.

I use a ReMarkable for essentially this. It works really well for me. I'm not a teacher or a student, I just like keeping my notes by hand. Also any time I need to fill out and sign a doc I put the PDF on the ReMarkable, mark it up, and send it back.

IME the the balance bikes are about the same price as a set of training wheels. And also re-usable - my youngest two kids used the same balance bike.

I'm in the sort of weird position of having worked at 3 different companies throughout the pandemic, all fully remote, and then also now having left the working world entirely to freelance. The best remote work experience that I had so far was at the last company I worked for, where I never even met any of my co-workers in person. The reason it worked well is that we had a very strong and socially re-enforced culture that worked something like this:

If you're working, you're available on chat (discord). If you're not available (like taking lunch or a break) set your status so everyone knows.

If you need to talk to someone, don't hesitate to ask.

If you send more than 2-3 chat messages as part of a discussion, just pull everyone in to a video room immediately and talk it through. (Discord makes this really easy.)

At first I was a little uneasy about being pulled in to video calls all the time, but I came to really appreciate it. I honestly think this worked better than "just turning your swivel chair" because our team was big enough that even in an office not everyone would be a swivel away.

I've worked jobs where I was on the road a lot. Sometimes you just gotta pee in a bottle. I don't think my employer (not Amazon) was doing anything wrong, or that there was anything they should have been doing differently. When ya gotta go ya gotta go.