It’s actually a nice article if it wouldn’t be so obviously AI written.

In my opinion this really devalues the reputation I am having for a publication and is a pity especially in this particular case as home assistant is such a great community.

I guess for a lot of the Show HN posts, people could accuse of being Ads.

This was an honest account of my experience coding this. If you do a bit of research on our company, you might come to a different judgement. But obviously everybody is free to have their own opinions.

Mostly codex, and initially claude. I'm planning a follow up post on more details of our process.

Different strategies.

- sometimes when it’s lost, just roll back. Commit very often. Sometimes it’s getting lost on simple and easy features - very unexpectedly.

- prompt regularly to review the architecture and clean up the code, check for specific things like code repetitions, error handling etc.

- keep an eye on the code yourself. At least on the general architectural side, and review complex code areas by hand

- ask always for larger features to make a plan first. Review the plan carefully. Only when the plan is ok, ask it to start coding.

I actually think this could be the completely wrong approach.

By focusing on only one persona, you might focus on one that for reasons NOT covered in this questionnaire does not work out.

Practical example from us at AirGradient. Initially, we had a strong focus on selling air quality monitoring to schools.

Our strategy would have ticked all boxes in this article but selling to schools turned out to be extremely difficult. In our case, the problem was that decision makers are often not the people benefiting from the solution. Another reason for that persona being very difficult was that air quality is not a core competency of a school.

So I actually think that you should have a relatively broad approach because often the customer that you will be successful with you actually might not know when you start.

100% agree. It is super important to know the composition of the particles.

Unfortunately currently only super expensive instruments can measure this in real-time.

This is why I believe contextual information will become much more important in future.

Detect an indoor short PM2.5 spike around lunch time, probably a cooking event.

Detect medium elevated levels outdoor in a city in the morning and late afternoons, probably traffic related smoke.

I actually made a small tool to simulate different events that contain a quiz. Give it a try here [1].

[1] https://www.airgradient.com/air-quality-monitoring-toolkit/p...

The quiz hides the chart. Makes it hard to answer

Achim from AirGradient here. Great to see this posted.

When we first heard about this new sensor, we were quite pessimistic about its performance but have been pleasantly surprised by its performance. It is something we consider now for potential future products.

We are also currently testing the energy consumption because we believe the fanless design should make it quite efficient; but not sure how much the laser needs. So we will keep the article updated as learn more.

With a powerful enough laser, the sensor could also improve air quality.

You can use an air purifier. The Hepa filters are effective in eliminating PM. Gases like NO2 and VOCs can be reduced with carbon filters. Make sure that your carbon filter is large and different get saturated too quickly.

What’s important to understand is that PM2.5 is not PM2.5.

It only defines the diameter of the particles but can be composed of very different elements. From salt that dissolves in the lungs to toxic metals.

Currently it is extremely difficult to get a comprehensive understanding of the health impacts of these particles.

Much more research needs to be done to understand which particle compositions and thus what sources of air pollution (eg traffic, wildfires, factories, landfills, ports etc) have what kind of health effects.

If you are interested to see an image how different PM2.5 particle look like, have a look at the photo in this blog post that one of our in-house scientists wrote [1].

[1] https://www.airgradient.com/blog/pm25-is-not-pm25/

(Edited and replaced weight with diameter)

Thanks. Unrelated, but this is the first time I grasped why electron microscopes are needed and not just some fancy tech:

> 0.3 micrometers are even smaller than the wavelength of light, which demonstrates the problem: how should we see something that is smaller than light itself?

It looks like this EUV microscope can image features that small: https://sharp.lbl.gov/

> It only defines the weight of the particles

Diameter, not weight. PM2.5 is particles of diameter 2.5μm or less.

Yes of course! Thanks for pointing it out. I corrected the above.

You're both right enough. Aerodynamic diameter doesn't measure the particles themselves, but how their settling velocity compares to a spherical reference ideal of a certain density (1g/cm*3) in a medium.

I don't deal with gas cleaning, but at those scales, if you work a lot with applied processes like filtration and separation, you can ballpark things like daltons with mass and size. I know I do with MWCOs.

I've also seen studies where the toxicity per microgram varied hugely depending on whether the source was traffic, coal, or biomass burning

Which source was worse?

Even VOC is still an open question. Are great smelling food, onions, etc bad for our lungs?

very interesting article, thanks for posting

Achim from AirGradient here. Some thoughts on this.

Purely focusing on the display, I can see a certain logic to say: Display not working => Not recommended. And probably I chose the wrong title for this as it made the article too much focused on this aspect.

However, the main critique for me is actually the general subjective nature of the article and the lack of a systematic testing approach for the monitors. In my opinion this review should not to be called "The Best Indoor Monitors" if Wired has an intention to provide objective and a balanced assessment of indoor monitors.

Of course I am unhappy that our monitor got labelled as "Not Recommended", but the bigger picture to what extent these "Best ..." reviews do provide a fair and comprehensive assessment is in my opinion the much more important discussion that we should have.