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I am seeking neighboring stores! Sometimes I crave gum on the street, Gum drop anyone?

To summarize, I used:

1. Low weight but very cool product (like Propeller Hats)

2. Raspberry Pi for controlling everything

3. Adafruit stepper motor for the dropping mechanism

4. Yarn for holding the hat

5. Roboflow for the AI


I dream of a world where I merely open my mouth and wish it and the gum just flies down into it, already unwrapped.

You’re working toward this world and I commend you.


I'll hold out for the teleportation-based version so I don't have to go through the effort of opening my mouth.


Startup opportunity: AI inside a small in-mouth implant to provide nerve stimulus to open mouth for you when it detects floaty inbound gum.


That does sound convenient. Can it be hooked up to my eyes to detect flies and close my mouth to make sure I don't inhale bugs while biking?


I would hope that we have invented error-free software development by then, though. Otherwise, a small error leading to the wrong coordinates could really ruin your day (or head)... ;)


Or use lasers and tiny gum-shaped smoke bombs to sample and model the local air column currents, pre soften and flatten a portion of the gum paper-thin with some sort of wettimg/rolling assembly, stage, then let it drop and form its own miniature gum parachute or replica of one of those whirling propeller seeds that have a built-in wing to slow their fall.


What about a “we will remember it for you wholesale” version of the gum experience - you pay money and are then implanted with memories that are indistinguishable from chewing the gum. I kinda think this is the end goal for all capitalism - you pay money for nothing.


Then a seagull flies overhead ;)


People still use gum in 2024? I thought it's a wide knowledge that it's bad for you in every single way


Apparently the knowledge isn't wide enough, because this is the first I'm hearing of it... Why is gum bad for you? I knew it was in a downward sales trend, but I figured that was just consumer preferences changing over time.


Gum with sugar is bad for your teeth. Gum without sugar has xylitol in it, which is good for your teeth, but may increase your risk of heart attacks and strokes due to it promoting blood clotting[1].

1: https://newsroom.clevelandclinic.org/2024/06/06/cleveland-cl...


Wait... gum with sugar? That exists?


Yes? Bazooka, double bubble, and big league chew off the top of my head. As well as every gum ball I've ever seen.


Not seen those brands in Sweden, but I checked the one we have that's for kids, a bubble gum named Hubba Bubba. Indeed, it has sugar! TIL.


Ingredients are poor for mouth and gut microbiome, but then again so is mostly everything else that's processed


https://www.statista.com/statistics/1026426/global-chewing-g...

Since you haven't seen someone chewing gum in a while, I'm now curious about where you live. North Korea? Singapore?


Why does this remind me of something out of a certain old point and click adventure game, it was one that had the verb USE apply to every type of action.

click>(GUM)

click>(SELF)

click>(USE)

"You used the GUM on yourself.

Nothing special happens.

You now have 0 GUM."

There was another game in the same genre that did the same, but with the verb OPERATE. As teenagers my friends and I used to laugh way too much at dialogue responses these games would craft, where you would get things like "OPERATE GUM on SELF"


I am pretty certain sugar-free gum is excellent for preventing cavities by increasing saliva production. That is one way it is not bad for you.


Well according to the gum brands it's good for your teeth. I've never heard of any evidence to the contrary, not even from my dentist.


I do, specifically Mastic gum.


Alright, I didn't mean the natural/medicinal gums


it's good for building up your jaw strength which can be pretty helpful.


Yes, one thing I wanted to mention was to develop/keep the jaw muscles, though eating dense enough food like nuts or dry froots does this too


At the speed of gravitational fall, it might choke you!


This is part of the challenge, as I want a pleasant experience. Not a terminal one.


Maybe a receiving chute? Small, portable, and a clearer indication (cannot be confused with a yawn), plus it'll open up the variety of comestibles you can purchase just s mouthful of. No more forks, no more spoons, just a little sloped thing to slow and guide


Perhaps small guided parachutes that receive an auto-correction location from the RPi and track the mouth? The issue is that the gum will be expensive.


Pre-chewed, perhaps.


For a slight additional fee.


CaaS (Chewed as a Service).


SaaCS (Service as a Chewing Substitute).


i work on roboflow. seeing all the creative ways people use computer vision is motivating for us. let me know (email in bio) if there's things you'd like to be better.


Slightly unrelated: Did the building owner/landlord complain about that? Is it legal?

I know a friend of mine whom the building asked to remove a camera they had. It was a camera used only to record the hill view in front of the building, so it isn't violating any privacy, and it was attached with magnets, so no damage whatsoever.


I was also curious about this. a bunch of BASE jumping hats dropping off a building is exactly the sort of project I would momentarily think about doing and never seriously entertain due to being certain that sooner or later someone, somewhere is going to sue me for some marginally harm-like side effect.


I don't know how litigous your region is but of all the people you know who have been sued, how many of them got sued for something silly vs a more low effort scheme like the classic throw yourself onto someones car and have 'back pain'? You might be safe to do silly shit on the basis that there are easier and better targets available.


Also curious if they had any grounds for that. I was under the impression that if you have a camera within your apartment (looking through window), nobody should be able to tell you no.

Unless perhaps the camera was attached outside their window (no longer their apartment), in a way that could be deemed unsafe and fall off and hurt someone, whereupon the building owner could be held liable? In that case I would find it reasonable to tell them to remove it.


> Unless perhaps the camera was attached outside their window

I remember it was on the balcony, securely attached. The building simply cited their policy, not any laws nor safety issues.


What if we had like a fridge with glass window and drinks or snacks organized in rows with identifiers for each. You could enter the identifier and make your payment to the fridge and it would drop the corresponding drink/snack to a slot on the bottom of the fridge.


> Sometimes I crave gum on the street

My immediate response to this was “ew, there’s already so much gum on the street”. Then I realized you meant you want to chew gum while walking down the street and I became enlightened.


There is always this option: https://youtu.be/vYrXLaU8guU


What do you think happens after they have enough of the gum? :)


After gum on the street, there's gum on the street


This is legitimately awesome. Nice job sir.


There’s plenty of gum already on the street. Simply scrape it up and you can have all the gum you desire.


the biggest thing he's overcoming is the rent?! how's he doing that while goofing off with projects like this?


Can you explain the intention behind your post?


The fact it was a whitepaper highly suggests a lifelong academic who has spent their careers publishing papers like these men, not a PHD student. Also, some of the word choices in the whitepaper and the initial reference to London banks being bailed out again suggest Satoshi is not a native American english speaker.


Who do you think writes most of the papers in the academic world? And what do you think PhD students spend most of their time doing?


Not PhD students. Anything else.


Majority of my projects were the front page of hackernews, I also tracked traffic, engagement, and users each time. End result is its almost entirely for my own ego and my peers seeing what I've done. No lasting users

https://dare.fail/me/


I love that website!

I wish more founders were like you, being open about what ideas failed in the past and honestly reflecting on why that was the case. Most founders I've met never speak about their failures and have a huge survivor's bias, and this is such a narrow game of chance that it's ridiculous to talk about the odds of succeeding when you don't have an unfair advantage over your competition.


Woah! just went through the website, and this is the most unique and oddly inspiring thing I've ever seen.


thats both impressive and inspiring, cheers


Got a few always in progress

Free reminder text service Lazyreminder.com

Free online interactive comic book maker Elonman.com


Neat, I love Lazy Reminder!


You might be amused that my company literally uses raspberry pi's in production as they are cheap and let us encourage our customers to hack on the robot themselves - https://openshelf.com/


This is targeting hobbyist and not the typical kind of production usage for embedded systems. I rarely heard of embedded people encouraging customers to hack their production system...


Came out recently every Bird scooter had a Pi in it. [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37016842


Showing as "not reachable" for me. Luckily it's not used for controlling an elevator or a car, or even worse a plane or a bomb, which usually is what "industry" is being referred to.


No reachable for me as well.

> which usually is what "industry" is being referred to.

Bingo. It's always a bit hard for me to properly communicate to people that the 'industry' is not an air monitoring/grafana-prometheus/PiHole/whatever low-volume, no risk application.


I think the url is supposed to be https://opshelf.com. Looks like whatever was serving openshelf.com fell over.

I'm not affiliated with this, just poked around. Looks neat by the way.


It is my opinion that very few interesting successes made it before the age of 30 - https://mrsteinberg.com/creatives-who-made-it-when-they-were...


Not sure where this prevailing myth comes from. I’ve went through y combinator twice, one of the batches I was in had an average age above 36. Many have never started a startup before. Paul Graham and his cofounders were 30 and up when starting their first company and much older for y combinator.

People will doubt you if you doubt yourself.


The most interesting finding so far is it will blur any human face: https://twitter.com/j_stonemountain/status/16986398994091911...

Open to more ideas of what to send it


If you want to you could get a normal job or keep it running on the side. Personally, I was prepared to do anything until it worked out as I had no option to get a job.

My history: https://dare.fail/


Your story is amazing and very inspiring.

> I was 90k in credit card debt and planning on foreclosing the company and declaring personal bankruptcy the same month we got acquired. At one point I recall having a major fight with my roommate at the time over him rounding down 30 cents on a bill we split.

I smiled and almost shed a tear reading this ^


Thanks! You reminded me to offer to buy him dinner


No option to get a job but dozens of jobs listed on this page? Am I missing the joke?


Bad tech CEOs all have the same playbook. Google “glass cliff.” Elon will step down and have this new CEO execute all his most unpopular decisions. Then he’ll swoop back in and be CEO again hoping to be the hero. Reddit did this. Yahoo did this. The lamest part is it kind of does help their image.


How do I sign up to volunteer as one of these sacrificial lamb CEOs? Because I'd absolutely love to fail at something and then get paid a bunch of money to look bad for a few months before people forget and I can retire into the sunset.


First step: get a title where it wouldn't embarrass the board to put you in the CEO position. This could be founder of a hot startup, or an executive at a competitor, or CEO of a smaller company.

Getting there is left as an exercise for the reader.


Elon’s circle is lousy with people begging to be that sacrificial lamb.


> How do I sign up to volunteer as one of these sacrificial lamb CEOs?

Be an executive at NBCUniversal in advertising, Twitter’s revenue engine, and also be on their CEO short list.


HN is the only place where you get real answers to that question!


Be already rich and connected.


Everyone parrots the same glass gliff term they recently learned but Musk has actually a good track record putting women to lead companies and them very much succeeding.


Who are these people?

What is this, a track record of 1? 2?

This doesn't seem like the type of thing you can do enough times to have a "track record" of.


SpaceX CEO should enough of an example.


Gwynne was hired at SpaceX the year it was founded, so she's had ample opportunity to operate the company the way she felt it needed to be operated.

Twitter is a well-established company that has been mismanaged for a decade and aggressively driven into the ground by Musk over the last 7 months.

These two situations aren't even remotely equivalent.


Twitter is a well-established company with a huge userbase and existing infrastructure.

Gwynne was hired to make something out of nothing in an unproven space (no pun intended), having to build everything from the ground up (also no pun intended).

Framing is a fun exercise, you can do it a lot of ways.


Well sure, your framing is just as correct as mine.

I don't think you're disagreeing with me that Gwynne and Linda Yaccarino are finding themselves in utterly dissimilar situations though, right?


Musk is CEO at SpaceX. Shotwell is COO.


A sample of one is not a track record.


How many opportunities has he had to do this? Certainly less than 5 at this high of a level right?


The critique is against saying someone has a "track record" with a sample size of one.

Not that Musk is demonstrably the opposite.


Because he has an outdated leadership playbook for Twitter. He has had a good track record and he also runs his other companies surprisingly well. I think this decision is set up for the new CEO to fail.


[flagged]


Please don't do this here.


What in the world has given you the impression that he's afraid of making unpopular decisions?


What unpopular decisions are left?


Ya I think he's actually unlike most other CEOs. The man does super unpopular decisions in front of everyone.


Reverting to the status quo before be bought the company and limiting free speech again to attract advertisers.

When Tucker Carlson announced that he'd post his new show on Twitter, Musk already sent a cryptic mail saying that Carlson would be subject to the same "community notes" as everyone else.

We'll see how it goes, I'm just getting vibes that everything will be reverted to a standard SV company.


That makes sense - online raconteurs were trying to act as if Twitter had some kind of unique deal with Tucker Carlson, so reiterating that Twitter is interested in factual truth, rather than partisan politics was a solid response.


Returning verification back to the previous system and admitting it was a mistake.


Did SpaceX do this? Who’s been their CEO?

Edit: lol, I guess she’s the President and COO, not CEO. Dunno if the point still stands, or not…


Not the same. Hiring a female CEO can and should happen often. But when a company is publicly failing, this is a tool used by male boards frequently enough to have its own Wikipedia page.


Didn’t @jack kind of do this too?

But it’s different when the founder/CEO is replaced only to return later. That’s a Steve Jobs play. When the CEO takes a new role, but still owns the company, that’s completely different (and certainly fits here).


And Bob Iger at Disney.


Who was the bad tech Reddit CEO?


I think they are talking about Ellen Pao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Pao

Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_Ohanian

> [...] He was also a partner at Y Combinator.

> [...]

> On July 2, 2015, Reddit fired communications director Victoria Taylor, an administrator who coordinated celebrity interviews from Reddit's New York office. In protest, volunteer moderators of the IAmA community set their forum to private, effectively turning it off, and other volunteer moderators followed suit because of "anger at the way the company routinely demands that the volunteers and community accept major changes that reduce [their] efficiency and increase [their] workload".[40] The following day, a moderator of IAmA posted that "Chooter (Victoria) was let go as an admin by u/kn0thing [Alexis Ohanian]",[41] an assertion that was not widely reported on.[42] Media outlets such as Variety blamed interim CEO Ellen Pao for the dismissal. Harassment, which was already being directed toward Pao in relation to other controversies, intensified and she resigned a week later.[43] However, on July 12, former CEO Yishan Wong informed the Reddit community that Taylor was fired by "the CEO's boss" and accused Ohanian of scapegoating.[42] In the aftermath of Pao's resignation, Ohanian elaborated on his role in Taylor's dismissal, countering that even though the AMA/IAmA changes came from him, he still reported to Pao.[44] In 2017, Pao criticized Ohanian for avoiding the fallout by attending Wimbledon in the days immediately following Taylor's firing.[45]


Then Ohanian went on to become a crypto bro and tried to force crypto monetization down reddit.

Great visionary here


Ellen Pao. She fired Victory who was very popular for running AMAs (Ask me anythings) with a lot of high powered people. The popularity of those dropped a bit after that and they were never the same.

Edit: Someone clarified below that Knothing took responsibility for firing Victory but Pao definitely took the heat for firing victory on top of nuking several popular (edgy and outright bad) subs


Pao did not fire Victoria, Ohanian did, as he later admitted:

https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/comme...


That's kind of the point of my post. She was the initial fallguy for firing victory. Knothing may have clarified it was at his insistence but I can tell you that most people didn't read his silly little apology post.


I thought I had a vague sense of why they stopped doing AMAs, but for the life of me I can't remember why now. Those were great.


Not sure you can do anything more unpopular than lay off 80% of your workspace, saddle your company with 13B debt and drive away advertisers only to bet everything on a $8 subscription paid by right wing simps. Like, what else unpopular would he need a scapegoat for?


I bet he's gonna give it a go though!


Twitter has 400m users. At $8 that's $3.2b/month, $38b/year. This might be a decision most social networks didn't take, and an unpopular one, but if it works it can have massive payoff.


How many are currently paying for Twitter Blue?

Best estimates are "somewhere around 450k" which is $3.6M/month or $43.2M/year. Which is only $956.8M short of the $1B/year debt servicing he saddled Twitter with. It's a GENIUS PLAN.


It's pretty clearly not working


Based on what quantifiable criteria?

All of twitter's usage records were broken after he bought it. All of them.


Which was November 2022, I think? Not entirely uncoincidentally, one of the most controversial World Cups of recent times was just about to take place which always generates a surge on social media platforms...


I cant think of a CEO for which this comment is less accurate than Elon Musk.


Can you explain? I find these threads fascinating because seemingly everyone has such ironclad logical reasons for thinking elon is actually just a big stinky doodoohead. Can you try to convince me?


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