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Show HN: I built a Iridium/LTE satellite GPS tracker and took it to the Arctic
51–60 of 60 posts
Re: Show HN: I built a Iridium/LTE satellite GPS tracker and took it to the Arctic
#52Hearing about Iridium reminded me of how excited I was to take on a job managing 5 engineers for them, until they offered me a base salary of $135,000 in Phoenix. They work on incredibly cool technology—I'm bummed I had to pass it up to work for some garbage web-focused tech company becayse Iridium pays pennies on the dollar to their engineering department.
> until they offered me a base salary of $135,000 in Phoenix
It's crazy to me that $11,250/month could be considered low for a comfy job like engineering manager, especially if the work is interesting. The cost of living in Phoenix must be through the roof?
Re: Show HN: I built a Iridium/LTE satellite GPS tracker and took it to the Arctic
#53Hearing about Iridium reminded me of how excited I was to take on a job managing 5 engineers for them, until they offered me a base salary of $135,000 in Phoenix. They work on incredibly cool technology—I'm bummed I had to pass it up to work for some garbage web-focused tech company becayse Iridium pays pennies on the dollar to their engineering department.
> until they offered me a base salary of $135,000 in Phoenix It's crazy to me that $11,250/month could be considered low for a comfy job like engineering manager, especially if the work is interesting. The cost of living in Phoenix must be through the roof?
If he has a wife and dependent children, he probably cares more about always being able to provide for them than about how appealing or satisfying his work is -- regardless of the cost of living in Phoenix.
Re: Show HN: I built a Iridium/LTE satellite GPS tracker and took it to the Arctic
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
> until they offered me a base salary of $135,000 in Phoenix It's crazy to me that $11,250/month could be considered low for a comfy job like engineering manager, especially if the work is interesting. The cost of living in Phoenix must be through the roof?
If he has a wife and dependent children, he probably cares more about always being able to provide for them than about how appealing or satisfying his work is -- regardless of the cost of living in Phoenix.
Can you not survive (and even live a pretty above average/good life) with a family on $11,250/month?
Re: Show HN: I built a Iridium/LTE satellite GPS tracker and took it to the Arctic
#55Great stuff! I'm starting to work a lot on the satellite space ( https://www.sourcemeta.com ), building a binary serialization format around JSON called JSON BinPack ( https://jsonbinpack.sourcemeta.com ) that is extremely space-efficient to pack more documents in the same Iridium uplink/downlink operation (up to 74% more compact than Protocol Buffers. See reproducible benchmark here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.12799…
Hey Juan, this looks promising - using a pre-shared schema would allow you to reduce payload sizes in the same way using pre-shared dictionaries makes compression more efficient (such as with zstd or brotli). Having worked on exactly this space in the past (sending and receiving messages from a microcontroller that eventually go through an Iridium SBD modem), some feedback: After spending a few minutes poking around…
Thanks for the very valuable and honest feedback. All really good points, mainly how lacking the website is in terms of documentation at the moment. Making notes and plan to address all of it!
Re: Show HN: I built a Iridium/LTE satellite GPS tracker and took it to the Arctic
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
If he has a wife and dependent children, he probably cares more about always being able to provide for them than about how appealing or satisfying his work is -- regardless of the cost of living in Phoenix.
Can you not survive (and even live a pretty above average/good life) with a family on $11,250/month?
Yes, one can, but--
You don't have children, do you?
Re: Show HN: I built a Iridium/LTE satellite GPS tracker and took it to the Arctic
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
The keyword of the problem there is Iridium. Their SBD (short burst data) and in fact all their services are just extremely expensive. This reseller doesn't really seem to put much margin on it. When I had a sat phone (needed to travel sometimes to questionable places for work) I used Thuraya which is much cheaper for airtime. 40€ gets you a whole year's worth of inbound service (airtime) and about 15 mins of call cr…
It's really a shame. Iridium could sell best-effort hobbyist-grade service in their excess capacity, which would get the hardware into people's hands, but they don't. Cynically I assume this is because it would be no different than their expensive service in practice, and cannibalize their premium offerings.
Yeah there were some other hobbyist-friendly budget offerings like swarm but they were acquired by starlink and pretty much deprecated.
Re: Show HN: I built a Iridium/LTE satellite GPS tracker and took it to the Arctic
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you not survive (and even live a pretty above average/good life) with a family on $11,250/month?
Yes, one can, but-- You don't have children, do you?
I don't, but I have friends with families that survive on way less than half of that.
You're never experienced life within working/middle class, have you?
Maybe, just maybe, we live in different parts of the world with very different levels of salary and/or cost of living.
Re: Show HN: I built a Iridium/LTE satellite GPS tracker and took it to the Arctic
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, one can, but-- You don't have children, do you?
I don't, but I have friends with families that survive on way less than half of that. You're never experienced life within working/middle class, have you? Maybe, just maybe, we live in different parts of the world with very different levels of salary and/or cost of living.
This conversation started[1] as an attempt to understand why a particular person made a particular choice about a job. You are letting your emotions (or maybe your social ideals or ethical principles) prevent you from understanding the situation from this particular person's point of view. Even if his annual income is $135,000, it can be rational and ethical to sacrifice some aspects of job satisfaction for even more income, e.g., if he is responsible for the economic security of an entire family.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41769450
Money is very useful, particularly for avoiding or recovering from the 100s of kinds of catastrophes than can befall a person, and even in the wealthiest parts of the world, most people's lives would be more secure and better if they had more money.
Re: Show HN: I built a Iridium/LTE satellite GPS tracker and took it to the Arctic
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't, but I have friends with families that survive on way less than half of that. You're never experienced life within working/middle class, have you? Maybe, just maybe, we live in different parts of the world with very different levels of salary and/or cost of living.
This conversation started[1] as an attempt to understand why a particular person made a particular choice about a job. You are letting your emotions (or maybe your social ideals or ethical principles) prevent you from understanding the situation from this particular person's point of view. Even if his annual income is $135,000, it can be rational and ethical to sacrifice some aspects of job satisfaction for even more…
> prevent you from understanding the situation from this particular person's point of view
I'm not, because you're not that person, you're a different person, who for some reason is trying to answer for them, while not actually knowing the reason. What's preventing me from knowing the reason is that person not answering to the question. Then it's not a life-or-death situation for me if they answer or not.
> Even if his annual income is $135,000, it can be rational and ethical to sacrifice some aspects of job satisfaction for even more income, e.g., if he is responsible for the economic security of an entire family.
Absolutely, I don't disagree with that. I disagree with the notion that this person cannot answer for themselves, and you have to somehow assume how my living situation is, when that's pretty far away from the topic.
I did lose my cool a bit when you asked me an irrelevant question, and then I replied with an irrelevant question myself just to show how off-topic all of that is. I'm sorry for letting my emotions get the best of me.