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ellenhp

888 karma · joined August 26, 2018

Software engineer and map connoisseur.

ellen.h.poe@gmail.com

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ellenhp··on Show HN: Self-Hosted Maps Stack
Lots of it is stuff that I've picked up over the years. I work(ed) in the maps industry for the last 4 years or so, until I was laid off about a week and a half ago. I do interact with OSM a little bit in the docker image generation but the servers (geocoder, tileserver, routing server) all pre-process their data to turn it into a format that's useful for each server's specific purpose. So none of the HTTP requests that my demo server is responding to right now actually directly touch any OSM data.

Most of the OSM data processing is done in the Makefile, but beware that it was very hastily written so it's not a perfect example:

https://github.com/ellenhp/headway/blob/main/Makefile

ellenhp··on Show HN: Self-Hosted Maps Stack
They don't host anything IIRC. But most of the FOSS maps ecosystem is based around their schema. I know Planetiler uses it at least.
ellenhp··on Show HN: Self-Hosted Maps Stack
That sounds wonderful! This project is primarily focused on people who want to self-host a google maps replacement, but self-hosting isn't for everyone so I think it would be really cool to host an instance that would work for most people. I'd love for it to grow beyond that though, because lots of people need tiles for static maps or other uses. I will need to re-architect the docker config a bit before it will work at planet scale, because right now mbtiles are bundled with the tileserver image.
ellenhp··on Show HN: Self-Hosted Maps Stack
I'd really love feedback and suggestions by the way! I have a fair amount of experience in maps but I've never just built an entire maps web app from scratch so I'm kind of stumbling through a lot of it, especially the web frontend stuff.
ellenhp··on The rise of never-ending job interviews
I guess I'm also an idiot then, thanks, how kind of you to say that.

Actually hang on, I'm editing this to be slightly meaner. Your whole take that doing this is a sign that she's either an idiot or on a power trip is a very familiar thing that people say about women in tech and I'm honestly tired of it, because I can see myself doing exactly what she did and I don't like it when people say those things about me. Please don't do that.

ellenhp··on The rise of never-ending job interviews
It's also possible that she hadn't seen the particular algorithm used before, or that she was having an off day or stressing about a meeting immediately after the interview, or that there were errors that she did see and she didn't want to say "yeah there are errors here" because doing so could affect the candidate's confidence in the interviews after hers. I could imagine any of these being true. Or she could just be a bad interviewer.
ellenhp··on The rise of never-ending job interviews
Yeah. If I were asking a trickier question and I got an interesting new variant of the solutions I'm aware of, I'd absolutely run it if I had time to type it up and everything. Most solutions are either something I've seen before verbatim or obviously wrong, though.
ellenhp··on The rise of never-ending job interviews
Are you saying that because this interviewer needs to run code to find logic errors, she's somehow not a competent engineer? Because I usually need to run code to find logic errors. Sometimes I use formal verification instead but that's pretty rare. Am I also not a competent engineer?
ellenhp··on Police are telling ShotSpotter to alter evidence from gunshot-detecting AI
Not to be pedantic but that's not what that means. That means that the slide was pulled back then released with the slide lock activated either manually or by an empty magazine. It's advisable to store pistols in this way with the magazine removed because it's generally the least threatening configuration a pistol can be in short of being disassembled.
ellenhp··on Online ID / age verification: the death of online search
I know you said you don't agree but you left that position up without a rebuttal so here goes. What if someone managed to dump of the personal information of everyone in an online support group for LGBT folks and published it. That's doxxing too and this would do nothing to mitigate it.
ellenhp··on Massachusetts health notifications app installed without users’ knowledge
I'm not smart enough to know what some of these words mean or if this guy is being truthful, but I found this comforting to read as a GrapheneOS user:

https://grapheneos.org/faq#baseband-isolation

ellenhp··on Apple’s tightly controlled App Store is teeming with scams
Is the idea that a nontechnical person might trust Apple really that outlandish to you? Do you have, like, family members or nontechnical friends?
ellenhp··on MH370 pilot made many turns and speed changes, new report reveals
If you have an SSB radio that you can hook up to a PC's sound card using VOX to activate the transmitter, you can use WSJT-X or similar software to do lots of digital modes like WSPR, PSK31, FT-8 and whatever's hot these days. I think best practice for WSPR is to keep power low though, so don't go crazy :)
ellenhp··on MH370 pilot made many turns and speed changes, new report reveals
Forget the radio heating up and cooling down, my cat walking by the coax going to my antenna is going to affect my SNR more than an airplane thousands of miles away will :)
ellenhp··on MH370 pilot made many turns and speed changes, new report reveals
With a big antenna array for beamforming, sure, you can do that. You absolutely cannot do over the horizon radar on 10 watts with two omnidirectional antennas though.
ellenhp··on MH370 pilot made many turns and speed changes, new report reveals
I mean, sure, measuring occlusion like this is possible in VHF, UHF and beyond. And radar is a real thing that exists, and you can even do passive radar, but to my knowledge you cannot do any of this outside the line of sight of the transmitter and receiver with an object that's only 1-4 wavelengths long. I'd love to be proven wrong because that would be wild and the kind of thing that makes me fall in love with radio all over again, but this source is completely bogus.
ellenhp··on MH370 pilot made many turns and speed changes, new report reveals
Yeah I'm not an expert in this stuff but I am an extra-class radio amateur and this sets off literally all my intellectual alarm bells. I'll take one for the team and go read the report but I agree that it seems like pure unadulterated bullshit.

The ionosphere is a very violent place for an HF radio signal. These radio waves do not travel in a straight line. They don't even come out of the ionosphere with the same polarization as they go in with. I cannot fathom how you could glean anything from a WSPR signal's RSSI.

edit 1: I'm just gonna live-text my thoughts on this as I go through it into this comment. First off, the software that this person developed, GDTAAA, doesn't seem to be available for viewing. Shame because I'd love to see it, but I guess I'll have to go by the paper.

edit 2: "An algorithm is run that calculates an expected received SNR based on the transmitter power and the short path distance" W O W, okay, not even taking into account an estimated noise for the receiving station. Nice. It also doesn't seem to take into account time of day, any of the different propagation modes like gray line, etc, or the wavelength of the transmission. Big yikes.

edit 3: WSPR signals have a transmission length of about two minutes. A 777 travels about 20 miles during that amount of time, and you're trying to use the average SNR of the entire 2 minute period to estimate whether an aircraft crossed the path of the signal. Even if the WSPR signal occupied the entire 20 mile-wide swath of sky that the aircraft was in during the WSPR transmission, the aircraft can only block about 0.2% of that swath at an given moment on account of it being absolutely tiny.

ellenhp··on Signal's CEO Just Hacked the Cops' Favorite Phone Cracking Tool
I think this is my first-ever comment on HN, and I'm basically just chiming in to say that under no circumstances should you even be talking to police in a situation like this. You can politely ask for a lawyer, politely ask if you're being detained and politely provide your basic information when asked like your name and address, but otherwise do not say anything at all.

This fantasy that you can get away from a situation in which you are being interrogated and your phone is being searched by being compliant and proving your innocence to the nice police officers is extremely dangerous. Being compliant and providing information beyond what's legally required is the exact opposite of what you want to do, and preventing yourself from being charged should be the last thing on your mind. You should take it as a given that you will be charged.

edit: If you're outside the USA ignore this advice and listen to someone more local who knows their stuff.

ellenhp··on Google recommends all North America employees work from home
Google's standard issue monitors are standard density. FAANG employees aren't used to fancy monitors, and can certainly get by without them.

Edited to remove a claim that I haven't seen 4k monitors, since I just realized the big displays we can get must be 4k. We can only have one of those though and they're not as fancy as you're claiming.

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