HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

alwayshumans

76 karma · joined August 25, 2020

submissionscomments
alwayshumans··on A submarine's weakness: its software?
The vast majority of navigational incidents are caused by human error, but better systems would give the crew a chance to realise their mistakes

At the moment lots of maritime crew have alarm fatigue, the system constantly warns them of danger so they learn to ignore alarms and when something super serious does happen, they can ignore it

alwayshumans··on A submarine's weakness: its software?
So one of the fundamental design elements of a electronic chart display information system(Ecdis) or warfare Ecdis is the use of the safety depth contour.

Anything inside the blue area would cause alarming on a traditional Ecdis.

The bigger issue is the data that is used to navigate on, I could write a very boring blog detailing why th systems work so badly...

alwayshumans··on AWS makes one-time donation of $5000 to curl
I wonder if it's just a random manager who approved the donation.

For those who don't have experience of big orgs 5k is often in the region where you don't need to go higher for approval or involve procurement

alwayshumans··on Project Starline: Feel like you're there, together
From my experience business travel is as much about sharing an experience as it is the discussion or dissemination of information. That's a hard thing to replicate
alwayshumans··on Cars are about to be a software platform, subscriptions and all
This just feels like the latest in a long line of industries trying to build a recurring revenue model fueled by greed.

Looking at the uproar from moves by Circut[1] and others makes me question how out of touch some of these companies are.

I think companies need to realise a subscription needs to deliver constant tangible value to the consumer.

1.https://connpirg.org/blogs/blog/usp/angry-crafting-moms-blow...

alwayshumans··on What3Words rescue incident
What3words is a clever bit of research that should never have been spun into a company.

It's just an implementation of a discrete global grid.

I don't think it is live anymore but there used to be a parody called What3fucks, you can probably guess what type of words it used

alwayshumans··on A new way to make maps with OpenStreetMap
In a typical example isn't this what route 53 solves?
alwayshumans··on A new way to make maps with OpenStreetMap
You can already host vector tiles within S3 that work with Mapbox and other libraries.

Not really sure what problem this is trying to solve.

alwayshumans··on Suez canal blocked by a massive ship
One interesting thing is the toll often fluctuates due to the oil price.

If the toll is deemed to be too high a vessel always has the option of going around the Cape.

Realistically it's always an option but the added time plus the additional wear on a vessel makes it undesirable.

alwayshumans··on SpaceX plans Starlink broadband for cars, boats, and planes
Most vessels will have some form of connectivity on board right now. It depends on their vicinity to coast.

Right now data sizes of an email are industry standard. As you go into 100s of Mb you start to see people really struggle.

I would look at BIM systems for a parallel with ships. Ships are incredibly complicated and often self reliant. Shore based monitoring is hated by the crew but vessel operators see return from it.

A simple example would be an extension of the IoT devices already on board probably around engines. Anything with tangible benefits to Efficiency and safety would see investment.

alwayshumans··on SpaceX plans Starlink broadband for cars, boats, and planes
Starlink has the potential to completely revolutionise the shipping sector. Digitisation in the maritime space has been slow and adoption/innovation has been hampered by poor connectivity.

Cheap connectivity could be incredible. Current sat systems are expensive and coverage is interesting.

IoT and autonomy offer the potential cost saving measures to get the investment from some of the most frugal operators.

alwayshumans··on OpenStreetMap charts a controversial new direction
The OS are making a lot more data freely available as part of the Geospatial commission push to make geospatial data more widely available to drive innovation. I wouldn't be surprised if this is all a slow response to external activities like OSM and Google
alwayshumans··on FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol
Interestingly the same techniques are applied to the fishing industry to monitor for illegal fishing in protected areas.
alwayshumans··on Fixing User Personas
I think the concept of a persona has morphed and been abused over time.

With my team we use them as a tool to organise a set of assumption's or hypotheses that we want to test. Then through further user research tools we look to validate these assumptions.

On the whole it's not perfect but it works well most of the time.

alwayshumans··on Monitor Airplane Traffic with a Raspberry Pi
My best guess would be that most commercial provider like MarineTraffic wouldn't show those vessels because they would be running duplicate MMSI numbers to hide their identity to make them harder to track.
alwayshumans··on Optimal Peanut Butter and Banana Sandwiches
The problem of finding the Centreline of the banana is similar to an issue you get in the GIS domain when rivers are captured as polygons.

Although it's not a straightforward process a series of Vorononoi polygons makes a pretty good Centreline. I think it might work for bananas.

https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/318721/creating-cent...