Readit NewsDead Comment
Counterpoint to starting a business: the founder of Nvidia, who is worth tens of billions, says if he had it to do over again, he wouldn't. Starting and running a business takes a tremendous toll. https://www.forbes.com/sites/julianteicke/2023/10/28/jensen-...
If you insist on proceeding... Validate demand first; once you find something you're sure people want, you know a great deal about these people and enjoy working with them. You're sure you can find lots of them, and you find the core problem you're working on fun and interesting.
My dad told me... "A successful business is when you can do something badly and people will still pay you for it." That's key in a startup because it takes a long time and a lot of money to do most things well, so you need customers who will settle for ok.
Good luck!
Beware of wealthy people saying they wouldn't do it again. They are just validating their own lifestory: it was hard, incredibly hard. Implicit in that statement are approximately 8 billion other statements, where they believe they suffered more than than every other individual on Earth who makes less than them.
We just simply don't need that much brine for useful minerals -- it's a huge cost and you'll be left with massive piles of mostly useless salt.
On one of my hard drives, I've got an engineering / construction plan for a moderately sized intake + discharge for a small RO facility that would've passed muster in Australia, which has pretty reasonable environmental protections. Round numbers - the intake would have cost $25 million and the discharge more like $75 million. You need a massive structure to be able to emit that brine back into the environment in a way that doesn't just nuke the surrounding marine life. Huge pipes + check valves + cascading discharges, all either on the ocean floor if there aren't reefs and other sensitive areas or even worse from a cost perspective, tunneled out to a depth that can handle the amount of salt.
Seawater is ~35g/L of TDS - the author is talking about 5 million acre feet of desal - what's that, 20 million tons of salt annually?
This is doable. Many coastal wastewater systems already have large pipes that extend miles to sea (1), and that's a rounding error compared to the many more miles of pipe routing sewage to the plant (2, pg A-3)
(1) https://www.wateronline.com/doc/new-10-mile-long-sewage-tunn...
(2) https://www.sandiego.gov/sites/default/files/ploovol4_15.pdf
Pipes tend to last a long time, in large part because it's relatively straightforward to manage the chemistry problem in the pipes.
0xNotMyAccount commented on Attacks on machine learning models rnikhil.com/2024/01/07/at... · Posted by u/whoami_nr
Has anyone tried the same adversarial examples against many different DNNs? I would think these are fairly brittle attacks in reality and only effective with some amount of inside knowledge.
0xNotMyAccount commented on Zeiss's "Holocam" turns glass windows into cameras digitalcameraworld.com/ne... · Posted by u/toss1
The article is poorly written, as it only discusses the camera component. Strangely, they chose stock images of holographic and optical displays, but didn’t mention that even once.
The Zeiss site is a much better read:
https://www.zeiss.com/corporate/en/about-zeiss/present/newsr...
In summary:
1) ZEISS unveils holographic Smart Glass at CES 2024, both for displays/projection/filtering, but also another component which is a holographic camera
2) The holocam works by utilizing coupling, decoupling, and light guiding elements to redirect incident light to a concealed sensor, eliminating the need for visible cutouts or installation spaces in visible areas.
3) ZEISS doesn’t plan to be manufacturer, so other companies can use the tech
Thanks for linking to that.
> coupling, decoupling and light guiding elements to divert incident light to a concealed sensor
So, there's a camera in the dash looking up at the windshield and focusing where it expects to see a face, thereby using the windshield as a reflector? And maybe there's some additional etching and deposited films in the windshield to support the angles required?
And perhaps you can put cameras elsewhere, and similarly subtly modify the windshield or other glass to look at other things as well?
0xNotMyAccount commented on Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US businessinsider.com/elect... · Posted by u/NN88
I've lived with an EV for 3 years now, and take some legit road trips from SF: Utah, Vegas, LA, San Diego, Tahoe. I have also been all over the world and done many, many trips (far to many to count). I submit the optimum mix for most Americans right now is roughly 1 EV and 1 hybrid, solar roofing and a battery storage system. The average American has a spouse. Even if we ignore kids, we can roughly assume, unless those suburbs are way more empty than they appear, that both people have a car. Let one have an EV, and one take a hybrid. That way, they can cover the occasional very long drive in relatively remote areas.
Keep in mind, it may very well eventually switch, where gas stations are less common than high power EV chargers in the remote areas. Sort of a Dutch disease issue: once the EV chargers are the dominant market, the gas station market is likely to quickly fade until it's just diesel and finally all electric.
The Mad Max theorists worry that they won't have power for their electric vehicles in the event of an apocalypse. Friends, how long do you think refineries, pipelines, and oil freighters are going to stay going in the event of an apocalypse? Better to get good at rigging some salvaged solar panels, an inverter, and re-learn the old pass times, like dominos, dice, and cards.
FedBizOpps. Here is a link to a search for more DARPA opportunities:
https://sam.gov/search/?index=opp&page=1&pageSize=25&sort=-m...
Similar link for Defense Innovation Unit: https://www.diu.mil/work-with-us
FedBizOpps. Here is a link to a search for more DARPA opportunities:
https://sam.gov/search/?index=opp&page=1&pageSize=25&sort=-m...
I live in this world and had no idea how to construct that link. This is the sort of stuff that keeps me coming back to HN.
This BNN, btw, is basically a playground for an advertising wunderkind
https://bnnbreaking.com/about
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurbaksh_Chahal