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Comment by qingcharles | Hacker News Reader

When you're an expert at something and you spend all your days looking at these things, you can pick out remarkable details from nothing. Any regular person looking at the original photo (below) would have seen nothing!

https://x.com/Warkslieutenant/status/1808884139585610231/pho...

(it's the picture with the curved frame on the left)

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An article from Smithsonian shows that there's a drawing showing what the gallery had looked like.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/art-historian-disc...

So somewhere in his brain he must have had "missing rounded-top portraits of 16th century VIPs, including one of Henry VIII posed kind of like this" filed away.

This article is much better than OPs. It clearly explains what the painting is missing from (a set of busts hung in a hall auctioned separately in 1781), and even shows a drawing of what that set is.

It does have a very unique shape, in the parlance of Playschool it’s through the arched window.

Just seeing the outline of the frame could probably highlighted it was part of the missing series, assuming that is there are very few other paintings with an arched frame.

my nephew is good at identifying teslas.

"if the door handles are straight - S, together - X, hockey sticks - 3 or Y. No handles? cybertruck" :)

Ultrasonics-2018…

In all fairness I used to be like that about late 80s and early 90s Honda civics

When i was a child ( 1970), we used to recognize cars by there tail lights.

Your nephew is picking up on design language

It's intentional and serves purpose. Anyone paying attention should find patterns/stylistic choice.

Saturn cars from decades past had very distinct looks, as did a Toyota. One is forgiven overlooking this in a world of "Nearly Everything Looks Like an Overweight Camry".

I remember reading something as a kid in the 70s where there was a character who could identify cars by their radiator grilles, so this tracks.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9v0UTn6Eqw: kid who recognizes cars by their taillight.

“Wetten dass” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetten,_dass..%3F) also once had a contestant who could recognize cars by the sound their doors make when closing them.

Do they work for bmw now?

I expect the same has happened with a lot of people here too. I know that I've been able to piece together pretty complicated situations from very limited evidence, amazing the junior devs on the team.

I also think this XKCD is relevant to the subject. You'll eventually become an expert on darn near anything you spend enough time on. https://xkcd.com/915/

Reminds me of Jesus' words: Everyone seeking finds...

Yeah there are some things you probably will never be a master of, but if you have the motivation to spend enough time at it, and not give up due to discouragement and reversals, you pretty much will become much better at it than you ever though possible.

It's funny to notice that the english language borrowed the word "connaisseur" from the french language but randomly changed the "a" to an "o" for whatever reason. In case you're wondering how it's related to the parent comment, "Connoisseur" is the title of the xkcd link.

Yeah, I worked with radiologists... What they can see in x-ray, CT, MR, PET, ultrasound... it's mind-boggling.

The most mind-blowing thing is just how much those skills rely on tacit knowledge and subconscious pattern recognition.

There is really a lesson to be learned here in our age when data-based everything is en vogue. Our decision-making shouldn’t be data-driven, it should be data-informed.

I disagree. Hasn't it been shown that AI outperform radiologists on recognizing diseases from images?

Not really. On very narrow datasets, from very specific machines. When they tried to generalize (the way a radiologist does) across multiple hospitals and multiple machines from different manufacturers, results are not that good.

can you point to any reports that provides these studies and outcomes?

This one comes to mind. The discussion section is helpful:

> Despite the many interesting discoveries in pathology AI, translation to routine clinical use remains rare and there are many questions and challenges around the evidence quality, risk of bias and robustness of the medical AI tools in general

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-024-01106-8

Anecdata but I broke two ribs and got an x-ray, a prescription and was sent home. While I was in line at the pharmacy the x-ray folks came and found me and sent me to the ER - one if their other techs looked at it and saw a punctured lung. None of the subsequent doctors/surgeons could see it on that x-ray but yeah, CT scan showed I had a punctured lung.

And yet, as a software developer or security researcher or whatever, we can do the same thing; for example a milliseconds delay in SSH leading to the uncovering of a years-long ploy to undermine security (although the diff that introduced the issue flew under the radar), or recognising an issue from the sounds a modem or hard drive makes.

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