> Every submission and comment must teach everyone something, expand views, ideas and contribute to society in some way. I don't think you telling how much trash you're picking is contributing to society.
I don't know about that. Last year the OP and friends worked to pick up and document trash and now, a year later, that information has been used to make informed decisions about how to keep our streets - and society - cleaner.
I'd argue that OP has quite definitively _contributed to society_.
If he'd just posted "I picked up some trash" - I could understand your comments, but he's done the work, gathered data, written about it, etc. So w/r/t to _teaching something_, I know more now than I did before reading his post.
Quite frankly, I could attempt to compare your contributions to society (aside from the snarky, dismissive comments on HN) but you've opted to hide behind a new, anonymous account. If you believe a submission is off-topic, just flag it, creating a new throwaway account just to disparage it seems a bit extreme.
And please understand, I don't say this to disparage you or insult your incredible intellect - just in the hope that perhaps I can _expand your views_ on how OP's submission is of interest to members of this community.
Thank you! Our SDK is written in Typescript and we're starting with support for building apps using React, but we plan to support other frontend frameworks as well.
It’s inspiring to see that picking up litter consistently had a big impact on a neighborhood. We were also surprised to see the strong effect the California Camp Fires had on litter. Hope you enjoy!
Background: My friends, Elena and Felipe, and I have been picking up litter 3x per week on Polk Street for year now. We logged all the litter we picked up to see what we can find. After a year picking up we decided to see what we can learn from the data and we wrote an article with the results.
Can you give us more information on the "Rubbish Beam", pictures, tech details, and why it's so expensive? You say on a request form that you're hoping to make it cheaper, but what's the biggest block to making that happen?
Is it just a standard grabber but with a cellphone holder and some kind of bluetooth trigger embedded in the "grabbing handle" that triggers the phone to take a picture?
Felipe here, I design and build the beams. Until now it was mostly an issue of scale as we refined the prototype. They took time to assemble and without large order price breaks on components the direct cost was high. We've invested time into a new version that is more scalable and will be ready soon.
Thanks for the feedback! Yes, fixmystreet.com is a great platform. I think for something like this an easy mobile experience is key, and we will be focusing on just litter for now.
Sustainability has been in the news a lot lately and we wanted to create an app that makes it easier to report, map, and clean up litter in your neighborhood.
We're gonna spend the next 6 months mapping litter and its impact in our community, San Francisco.
This is a soft launch, but feedback is greatly appreciated. We put a lot of attention into trying to make the UI feel good and make the app as delightful as possible. Bugs sometimes get in the way of that :)
