My phone replaced a brass plug | Hacker News Reader

My phone replaced a brass plug

drobinin.com

185 pointsvalzevul57 comments

> I wanted to cook venison from scratch, which meant learning to shoot, which meant keeping track of my progress, which meant porting a 2012 OpenCV paper and training a state-of-the-art computer vision model, which meant the dinner took a bit longer than expected.

Procrastination level: Ultimate

yak shaving

Yup. Or deer shaving, in this case. The punchline is he never actually got round to shooting a deer.

I do think he understated the difficulty of the hunt itself. He's planning to use the "supervision" rule to avoid needing his own firearm license, and male deer are indeed unlicensed for shooting (but not female deer!). Then you have to find one. He's right that they have reached "pest" status, since humans killed off the wolves. Every now and again someone suggests reintroducing the wolves, to cull the deer (and occasional tourists).

The open terrain (because the deer eat saplings) can make it easier. I have a great photo somewhere of a single majestic deer which I just happened to see from the road when I had my telephoto lens with me and mounted on the camera. I've even once seen a deer in Edinburgh itself, along a railway cutting.

Wolves are back to continental Europe. Takes some time to get everyone to accommodate again. Breeders are not amused.

Or a Carl Sagan fan:

> If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

From episode 9 of his Cosmos TV series.

https://kottke.org/23/11/if-you-wish-to-make-an-apple-pie-fr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos:_A_Personal_Voyage

There were a number of "history of technology & invention" TV series, all inspired by Connections.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series...

This read is amazing and the development work is very impressive, great job and congrats! That said, my 20-30yo self would end at that. However, my 40yo+ self has a piece of wisdom here: the brass plugs are there for a reason: they slow things down. Technocracy (screens, apps, automation) is not good for our mental health. Human minds need small, calm, slow, manual processes. Like plugging the brass plugs.

My USPSA rank is public: I'm terrible with pistols. I haven't shot in competition for over a decade. This is the kind of project that tickles a couple of my nerves and might get me back to the range.

Scoring is based on the outermost ring, rather than the innermost ring?

Huh. I'd have expected it to be based on the center, but I guess the goal is "it must be entirely within this ring to count" rather than just "I hit this ring".

I think it depends on the discipline, NSRA .22 in the post uses the outermost edge, but ISSF (Olympic rifle/pistol, for example) uses the innermost edge.

Isn't .22 a bit small for deer? I don't know anything though, so this isn't an informed objection just a question. Or were you just learning fundamentals of shooting before trying a bigger caliber?

I was thinking the same thing.

Aye, I think most people use something like .243 for stalking, but the closest range was indoors, so I didn’t have much choice.

My goal was to get a deer stalking certificate (e.g DSC1), which includes a shooting test: 2 chest shots at 100m from prone, 2 chest shots at 70m from standing/kneeling/sitting, and 2 head shots from 10-20m standing (they use cardboard deer targets, so not far from training at a range).

This ... Is beautiful

A very nice read and surprising ending. Love the perseverance of the research and the cleanliness of the app.

I like author's style / voice. Very soothing, very humane.

Is it is consistent for old posts too, I hope it is not LLM :)

For comment reading edification, there are already electronic scoring targets for shooting.[0]

They use wave detection from each corner - either air/sound or via the target backing - to triangulate and with modern electronics can be quite accurate.

It's nice from an audience point of view to be able to see the results of each shot almost immediately. Kinda like watching snooker championships.

This approach is novel however and has other pros and cons.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_scoring_system

There are also targets with fluorescent backgrounds and special black paint that flakes off near the holes. There is a limit to how many holes you can see in the target but it is way better than plain paper.

If you always count borderline shots as in, or out, then you will be consistent enough to help you track the only thing that matters, your progress.

Wasn't sure what to expect when I clicked this link.

> Best gourmet pastries this side of the pond (and they also do doughnuts!).

Haha no, not even close. Saddler's Forfar Bridies take that prize.

That has to have been an intentional joke; Greggs' aren't good, just cheap and ubiquitous, and almost any proper hand-made-on-site bakery will beat them.

With all due respect, driving past Dundee every time I fancy a wee pasty is a bit too much (and they don't do doughnuts).

The title is so bad, can't understand what's it about. Atleast around other topics here.

No, it’s a great title. It was curious enough that I clicked and then I read the whole thing.

It’s unlikely I would have done that if it had been something like “Using computer vision to score rifle shooting cards”.

In other words it's a great clickbait title, yet still a bad title.

I wouldn't say that. The current title indicates that the article is likely written in a less clinical manner than an article called "Using computer vision to score rifle shooting cards" would have been.

Thanks for that, now I know I don't care about the contents before clicking. Misleading titles (something about smartphones and metals?) is why people open comments before reading the article

Clickbait is where the title leads you to believe the article is more interesting than it is. I'd argue this was the opposite of that.

Would you call titles of other media click bait too, like 1984 or Gone with the wind? Sometimes an article doesn't have to have a literal title, sometimes it's an artistic decision to have a more vague title that nevertheless relates to the media.

No - just because a title inspires curiosity doesn’t mean it is clickbait. Clickbait titles are urgent and generally either over-egg something or are misleading.

This was just a good title.

Thinking about this a little more: the reason I opened and read the piece was because it inspired questions. First of all, a phone and a brass plug are conceptually different things. So immediately I thought “how can a phone replace a plug? What sort of plug?” Then I thought more about plugs - is it a bath plug? An electrical plug? This doesn’t make sense! How can a phone replace a plug? And then the specific fact it was a BRASS plug made me even more curious. What sort of plugs are made from brass? It’s a strange and specific thing to make a plug from… there’s clearly something I’m missing here and I’d like to find out more. So then I opened the piece, and the quality of the writing meant that, invested in the question as I already was, I didn’t really mind that the answer wasn’t immediate. I was prepared to go on the journey the writer had contradicted for me to find what I needed to know.

That’s why it’s a great title, because the questions it prompted meant that by the time I clicked and started reading I was already mentally invested in the journey.

I found reading the article made it pretty clear what it was about.

Huh! Fellow Edinburgh resident here. I had no idea there was a rifle range here.

There are quite a few around the country but they are literally underground. You generally fire the guns in a tunnel.

There are a few outdoor ranges around Edinburgh but they focus on clay shooting and shotguns. I think there are one or two rifle ranges in town but they only accept students.

The one I went to is indoors, although not a tunnel but a Nissen hut [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissen_hut

>> .22 bullet is 0.22" across (duh)

Um... No. An american 22 can be very slightly smaller. American-invented calibers are measured to the depth of the grooves in a rifled barrel. The rest of the world measures to the flat parts between the grooves. So no, it is not obvious how wide a bullet is.

And beware the plural. If someone (usually a salty navy person) says that a gun is "50 calibers" he means something completely different than a "50 caliber".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliber

Yeah, given the nominal precision it's surprising how far off some of the numbers are. A .38 is the same diameter as a .357.

> A .38 is the same diameter as a .357.

Not just diameter, the bullet itself is identical. The cartridge is longer with more powder in a .357, which makes it a good bit more powerful in practice (2 to 3 times as much energy).

The explanation for the caliber discrepancy is halfway interesting:

"Despite its name, the caliber of the .38 Special cartridge is actually .357 inches (36 caliber/9.07 mm), with the ".38" referring to the approximate diameter of the loaded brass case. This came about because the original 38-caliber cartridge, the .38 Short Colt, was designed for use in converted .36-caliber cap-and-ball Navy revolvers, which had untapered cylindrical firing chambers of approximately 0.374-inch (9.5 mm) diameter that required heeled bullets, the exposed portion of which was the same diameter as the cartridge case."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.38_Special

Legacy and marketing have as much to do with it as local variations in how bores are actually measured do.

All the .38s and 9mms of the world are just slight variations on .36" round ball, .44 caliber pistols are generally .429", there's a .45" pistol caliber labelled .460 (.454 also counts), .50 BMG is actually .510", calibers claimed to be "7.62mm" use either a .308" or .311" projectile depending on the country of origin and sometimes not even then (France and Switzerland call this size 7.5mm, Argentina called this 7.65mm, Japan called it 7.7mm, the British called it .303), "8mm" can be either a .318" or .323" projectile, .32s are all .312" diameter, but one cartridge that uses this same projectile labels it as .30 and another .327.

The same 5.7mm projectile (.224") is used in cartridges that claim to have a diameter of .220, .221, .222, .223, .224, .225, 5.6mm, 5.56mm, and 5.7mm.

.277" projectiles are used in cartridges that call themselves 6.8mm, .270, .277; same thing with .284" projectiles used in cartridges that call themselves 7mm and .280.

Wow, I had no idea. The ones we had at the range were 0.22LR and the boxes are marked 5.7 mm which is also not precisely 0.22".

Won't a fired .22 bullet be sized to the depth of the grooves due to obturation?

It is more complex. A softer bullet can get wider durong firing. And the barrel can expand slight also. This is why caliber invention isnt as simple as just picking a size.

Amazing app, can we get it on Android pretty please.

I've been building a similar piece of software but with vibe coding. It's to the point that I'm using gauge blocks to measure the precise scoring ring dimensions and then using various warping techniques to get the photo to map precisely. In a weekend I've been able to get it to sub pixel accuracy.

Of all the things one can automate in this whole journey - he chose the ring counting on the shooting range? I don't get it.

I totally see the programming challenge there, but it's in no substantial way making the journey any easier. Any somewhat working human brain can count this quite quickly and then move on with other things.

Really, I don't get it.

Now that the software exists, one can use it from a mounted camera and provide immediate scoring. No need to wait for the human and the target to be in proximity.

Counting rings is easy indeed, but scoring borderline shots without a scoring gauge is not, because the visible bullet hole is often smaller than the bullet itself.

But why would he care about this millimeter precision? His objective is not to participate in the Olympics but to shoot deer. He wants to improve general shooting abilities, not sub-millimeter accuracy. If he now and then counts a ring wrong, then what's the problem? That's what I don't get.

> His objective is not to participate in the Olympics but to shoot deer.

Where do you see that?

The article is about someone in Scotland who took up marksmanship as a hobby.

The article literally starts with "I wanted to cook venison from scratch, which meant learning to shoot"

Maybe it’s just that I identify so strongly with the author in that way, then - I saw that, but didn’t see it as a rationale for the rest of the article. It was just “here’s the path that led to my picking up marksmanship as an interest”.

No, that's fair (OP here) - I went to the range to learn how to hold the rifle in the first place, but indoor shooting with .22 from 25 yards in a stiff shooting jacket is as far from shooting a deer with .243 as it gets, so I stayed for the fun of it and the community around it.

I would definitely get to the point of stalking deer faster if I were to book a few 1-1 sessions at an outdoor range instead, but "faster" was never the point.

> Where do you see that?

There are multiple mentions of him being motivated by wanting to shoot deer for meat. It is a through line via the article.

> The article is about someone in Scotland who took up marksmanship as a hobby.

I wish it were so. With a bit more self awareness the author could have said “initially picked up a rifle to learn to hunt deer, but doing so i learned how targets are scored and become interested in automating that process.” There is nothing wrong with that. But pretending that someone is doing all this coding to get better charcuterie is where it becomes frustrating yak shaving.

The guy is clearly an obsessive hyper-perfectionist- he's telling (or boasting) of taking a culinary obsession from reproducing fine-dining dishes (when most people are content mastering a few decent recipes) to building automates curing chambers and butchering whole animals. It's kind of obvious that this personality leads from any random objective to into the deepest of the rabbit holes where everything is studied and annotated with the utmost precision. Funny as a clinical case, not sure I'd like to be around someone like this though :)

Point is that sub-millimeter precision when measuring rings is doing absolutely nothing to further his shooting skills to take down a tasty deer. To the contrary. Time is limited, and every minute spent perfecting this automation was not spent improving shooting skills by, you know, shooting. In other words, this may well have made him a worse shooter than he could have been. Nothing wrong with it, but let's call it for what it is.

A perfectionist defines a goal and then finds the perfect path to get there. He was just giving in to distractions and "perfectionist" is the wrong label.

It's not about submillimetre precision (OP here), it's about knowing if you can shoot well. The most common deer stalking certification in the UK (DSC1) involves three shooting tests from 20, 70, and 100m - if I don't care about 8/10 vs 9/10 shots from 25 yards, there is no way I am putting a shot within a 4" circle from 100 metres.

> every minute spent perfecting this automation was not spent improving shooting skills by, you know, shooting

I mention in the post that I had access to the range only 1-2 evenings a week, so there was no way I could improve my skills outside of these few hours.

Thanks for joining the discussion!

> if I don't care about 8/10 vs 9/10 shots from 25 yards, there is no way I am putting a shot within a 4" circle from 100 metres.

Totally with you there. Though isn't what counts in the end how close you were to the center? If you look with your eyes and it looks like it was in the 3rd ring, what does it matter whether it "technically" wasn't because half a millimeter was in the next ring? It was surely much better shot than fully in the next one, unless you actually want to go to the olympics or are otherwise competing in the sport.

Don't get me wrong, I totally respect the challenge of automating the counting but that this actually helped your progress still seems doubtful to me.

> I mention in the post that I had access to the range only 1-2 evenings a week, so there was no way I could improve my skills outside of these few hours

Ok, fair. Though we can surely agree that even though the automation-building that you did during all this extra time improved your skills, it was coding skills rather than shooting skills? (Which, again, is fantastic!)

Because he kept hitting his head on the low ceiling beams as he walked over to look at his target.

If he had been shooting at an outdoor range, or even an indoor range with a higher ceiling, he probably wouldn't have been pushed to automate the process.

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