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brittohalloran

765 karma · joined June 12, 2012

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brittohalloran··on iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro
The Pixel 3XL and others had it right - fingerprint sensor on the back (natural spot for your pointer finger), still allowing for the whole front of the device to be the screen.
brittohalloran··on Backup Your Data to Paper
Back of the envelope on storage capacity: - Looks like about 200x200 px grid - 200x200 = 40,000 total possible bits - Assume only 75% of these are available for data due to QR structure and redundancy features - Leaves about 30,000 bits or 3-4 kb capacity in that one image - Comes out to about 5 reams of paper per mb of data storage

This would be a better "ping pong balls on a plane" interview question for comp sci candidates.

brittohalloran··on Juul, Philip Morris Sued Under Racketeer Act for Targeting Kids
Great comparison. Diffuse and delayed consequences that would require a "painful" change of habits now to prevent. In a way cigarettes are an easier problem to solve because the consequences are personal and personally preventable. No "drop in the bucket" collective action problem.
brittohalloran··on Guido blames social media for his decision to abandon the supervision of Python
PEP-8016 [1] has the details of the steering council mechanism (5 person elected council, describes their powers), and PEP-8100 [2] has the results of the election and now shows vote totals.

[1] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-8016/

[2] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-8100/#results

brittohalloran··on Mastodon Bone Findings Could Upend Our Understanding of Human History (2017)
I believe the original comment was referring to being misled / confused about the decentralized social network Mastodon (https://joinmastodon.org/), not being misled as to the significance of the finding.
brittohalloran··on Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
Super interesting idea. One of the cons could be that having your employees not personally invested in the outcome of your venture could make them less likely to be "fully committed" (i.e. long hours, going above and beyond). You might be worried about higher levels of apathy -- "if this doesn't work I still have a job".

If the business works, I'm thinking the transition from the fund swat team to "real" employees might be difficult as well, probably at a time when you need to be firing on all cylinders.

brittohalloran··on Apple Signs Deal with Volkswagen for Driverless Car
> you need lidar and a fully mapped road

To play devil's advocate - somehow I drove myself to work today, and the hardware I'm running is just two moderate resolution limited field of view cameras. Not an expert, but from first principles it should be possible to pilot a self-driving car with cameras only, given enough processing power and a smart enough agent. Maybe those last two aren't there in 2018 though.

brittohalloran··on Ditch the Batteries: Off-Grid Compressed Air Energy Storage
Similar to those gravity power modules: a company called Ares (https://www.aresnorthamerica.com/) is trying to use much smaller concrete 'cars' on rails to store energy. Not sure of the status of it but it looked promising to me.

The direct use of compressed air is interesting. Taking it to the extreme, you could have compressed air as your primary utility piped through your home, and have appliances that run off compressed air. Refrigeration cycle is compression based anyway for example. You would still need some electricity for control circuits for example, but you might be able to keep the heavy lifting air-based.

brittohalloran··on Show HN: Offline Object Detection and Tracking on a Raspberry Pi
Did you look at Resin OS at all (resin.io)? No affiliation. Ship a container to your Pi that you can develop on your laptop and then have built for the ARM architecture on Resin's server. It looked very good last fall when I was toying around with Pi video but never pursued it.
brittohalloran··on Mounting criticism of NIH's relationship with the alcohol industry
Unbelievable. Thanks. The top decile actually consume over 75% of the alcohol (by number of drinks, probably less by dollars)
brittohalloran··on Mounting criticism of NIH's relationship with the alcohol industry
Do you have any data on this? There are certainly heavy consumers but my (not data backed) feeling was that there's a fat tail - if there are thousands of high consumption binge drinkers then there are millions of casual "several drinks a week" drinkers that would dominate the actual dollars spent.

Also, unlike say internet bandwidth, there is actually a logistical limit to how much alcohol you could consume in a week, and it doesn't seem like it could be much more than 1 order of magnitude over the average casual consumer (3-4 drinks vs. 30-40 per week).

brittohalloran··on Amazon, Berkshire, JPMorgan to Create Healthcare Company
As a 10 year engineer in the medical device industry I've slowly come to believe the root cause is not greed for more profit, but actually runaway altruism.

All across healthcare, providers, scientists, administrators are faced with millions of tiny choices every day: should we spend more money to improve outcomes. Should we add that extra feature to this device - costs more but improves care a little. Should we use this more expensive material - costs more but is probably safer. Should we do additional testing - costs more but we'll be more sure it's safe. The calculus of incremental value vs. cost is subconsciously seen as inhumane across the industry -- it's seen as starting down that slippery slope that ends with a "dollars per life" number which feels wrong to everyone. Nobody wants to be the person who traded someone's health for a buck.

I'm not necessarily condemning it, I want the best possible care for my children, but I do think that (like a lot of big socioeconomic problems) this comes back to incentives.

brittohalloran··on Vision Kit – An image recognition device that can see and identify objects
It costs $45 (+ Pi Zero W + Camera + SD card = approx. $90 total) and could be left somewhere analyzing video frames and communicating results.
brittohalloran··on Vision Kit – An image recognition device that can see and identify objects
The one new looking item is the VisionBonnet (with a low power Intel Movidius chip [1]). I've been pounding away on a low power / low cost NN vision device and now in the last two days we got Amazon DeepLens and this Google AIY Vision kit. Exciting and frustrating at the same time.

[1] https://www.movidius.com/solutions/vision-processing-unit

brittohalloran··on Eager Execution: An imperative, define-by-run interface to TensorFlow
What are the strengths and weaknesses of each? I've been using keras but planning on diving into a real deal framework next. Tensorflow is appealing for the momentum it has in the community, but pytorch looks easier to learn.

Doing image classification, object localization, and homography (given an input image, which of my known template images is matches it and in what orientation).

brittohalloran··on Getting the Most Out of Sqlite3 with Python
Been meaning to try this, good write up.

An alternative between keeping all data in-memory and going full relational database that's worked well for me is Python + H5PY. Write a simple class where your data getters / setters interact directly with the H5 file and don't keep it in memory.

Super fast (data handling and setup), easy on memory, and doesn't lock you into the schema of a relational database.

brittohalloran··on Applying medical statistics to Backblaze Hard Drive stats
Love the idea of applying statistical techniques typically used in field x to data from field y.

I'm always seeing places to apply manufacturing process control statistics like control charting [0] and process capability index [1] 'in the wild'.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_chart [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_capability_index

brittohalloran··on Redesigning the smartphone dial pad
This missing element of that analysis is that in the smartphone era you almost never type out a phone number. You were texted it and click on it, see it on the web and click on it, found the company on Google maps and click on it...

The dial-pad may be too difficult to reach on our big screens now, but the momentum required to change it will never exist because it simply doesn't get enough use to be a pain point anymore.

Excellent write up and use of graphics though. The Bell labs part was really interesting.

brittohalloran··on The Limitations of Deep Learning
Don't underestimate the self fulfilling prophecy effect. Quite possible that the massive influx into the field right now will move the needle.
brittohalloran··on [dead]
What are your thoughts on conda instead of virtualenv?
brittohalloran··on 3d Printing at UPS
Right, but it doesn't make sense for it to be on a retail floor then. All the machines should be in a big Amazon style warehouse to share supplies, service support, programmers, etc...
brittohalloran··on 3d Printing at UPS
Except that anything large enough or detailed enough to be worth printing takes many hours to run. Not a great "stop by and get something printed" use case. I think the best type of business here is a "upload your file and receive the part in the mail in 2 days".
brittohalloran··on The Sun's Magnetic Field is about to Flip
Doppler shift. One of the simplest and most deeply useful physics principles. Things you learned in high school that are actually useful way down the road. Basic trigonometry (Sohcahtoa) falls in the same category for me.
brittohalloran··on I launched my weekend project 7 months ago on HN – here's CameraLends today
Looks nice, congrats. First time seeing it and my most obvious question isn't answered on the homepage: what happens if someone smashes my gear I rented out?

You should prominently highlight a protection policy.

brittohalloran··on Website Screenshot Of Every Two-letter Domain
Incredible how many of these are not being utilized
brittohalloran··on White Coke
The standard Brita pitcher filter is a mix of granular activated carbon (from coconuts), and the ion exchange resin you talk about.
brittohalloran··on Ice mass the size of Greenland overlooked in climate models
TLDR; Since the historical ice models, driven by fossil based sea level readings in Barbados, failed to account for the way the Earth's crust bends under the weight of a massive ice sheet on top of it, there was actually much more ice than previously thought. The exact implications aren't given, but it is implied that global warming is worse than we thought (has melted more ice).
brittohalloran··on Pandora and Royalties
Biggest takeaway from all of this back and forth, don't become a musician.
brittohalloran··on Mobile app startups are failing like it’s 1999 (2012)
Like this approach
brittohalloran··on Feds Hunted for Snowden in Days Before NSA Programs Went Public
I wonder if they checked his Facebook messages and Google maps searches.
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