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rompic

253 karma · joined September 4, 2013

Hi, I'm Roman I live and work in Vienna, Austria

Twitter: https://twitter.com/RomPic Email: hn at pickl dot eu Web: https://pickl.eu/

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rompic··on How we can reduce traffic congestion
Welcome to the party google. At graphmasters we have been doing this with nunav for more than 13 years now.
rompic··on Organic Maps
In Europe you could use NUNAV, which does collaborative routing to avoid this scenario (I work for the company that develops it).
rompic··on Notes from Optimizing CPU-Bound Go Hot Paths
Nice article. I ran into similar issues when optimizing some code. After looking at a lot of cpu profs I found that llms can be quite powerful, to quickly do micro benchmarks and experiment with potential performance improvements. A lot of dead ends but I found some 10%-20% improvements that way.
rompic··on OpenTrafficMap
As discussed in the video they are not resetting the packet sequence number though, making it easy to match them with the other data transmitted.
rompic··on OpenTrafficMap
They are doing it with the standard WIFI receiver. Currently they are sending the Wireshark dumps to a backend for processing.

According to their presentation they are working on a rust firmware to do everything on the board.

rompic··on OpenTrafficMap
Fully agree. That's the most interesting thing about this.
rompic··on Show HN: The text disappears when you screenshot it
Maybe not exactly what you meant but it reminded me about the following: When one of our apple servers failed a decade ago and just vomitted out walls of error logs too fast to read anything,the apple support guy we called took his smartphone and made some photos to read and fix the error.
rompic··on AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study
IBM / Hofstede has a lot of studies on this.
rompic··on Making Postgres slower
My best was 5000:1 by updating the outdated SQLite in one of the companies' products.

I found that we were hit by a bug that was fixed 6 years before I discovered it (https://sqlite.org/src/info/6f2222d550f5b0ee7ed). Sqlite's query planner assumed that a field with a not null constraint can never be null, which isn't the case for the right hand table in a left join.

rompic··on Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API
To ensure that the monkey of a monkey test (an emulated user doing random taps) cannot do all possible actions.

https://books.google.nl/books?id=68BZEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA96&lpg=PA... "Bruce grew the lab over the years from an initial set of seven devices to more

than 400. He said there were some unanticipated problems to resolve over that time. "One day I walked into the monkey lab to hear a voice say, '911-What's your emergency?" That situation resulted in Dianne adding a new function to the API, isUserAMonkey(), which is used to gate actions that monkeys shouldn't take during tests (including dialing the phone and resetting the device)."

rompic··on Harvest the sun twice: Agrivoltaics promises sustainable food, energy and water
Just read an article about one of these in the local newspaper.

They currently have some challenges with bureaucracy, at least in Austria:

Given that it is an industrial facility it has to be secured from unauthorized access, but as it is a field, it has to be accessable to small animals. So now it is fenced with barbed wire on the top but it's open at the bottom.

rompic··on Immorality Begins at 40 (2016)
Just because this stuck with me: Viktor Frankl once wrote that meaning in life is not a Rorschach test (i.e. has to be made up) but rather a puzzle picture ("Vexierbild", is already there and has to be found).

I don't think this contradicts what you wrote, though.

rompic··on Researchers find high levels of lead, mercury and arsenic in Beethoven's hair
There's a very interesting German (Austrian) podcast episode about this here: https://www.falter.at/podcasts/gerichtsmedizin/20221202/klen...
rompic··on Running a Raspberry Pi with a read-only root filesystem
As it's not mentioned yet: log2ram already helped a lot in my tiny pi-hole setup.
rompic··on Maps that show time instead of space
There is also https://www.mapnificent.net/ For public transport
rompic··on Prosthetic limbs need not look like real ones
i remember talking to a former colleague who wrote a game to let people train to control their prosthetic arm at home. I asked him what the most wished for feature / most asked question for this prosthetic arm was and he told me that the most asked for question was if (mostly female) users could put nail polish on its "nails".

Anecdata, but I assume most users just want to have a life-like replacement.

rompic··on Heat pumps, more than you wanted to know (2023)
Not that I'm aware off. It's hard to judge because I didn't check a lot of times during the night. What I know though, is that the fan was not blowing up, but sideways into our direction.
rompic··on Heat pumps, more than you wanted to know (2023)
Fujitsu woha080lfca
rompic··on Heat pumps, more than you wanted to know (2023)
See my comment below. The heat pump of my neighbour was perfectly within spec (Fujitsu woha080lfca).

It emitted around 69 dB (measured on our side of the property, also checked by an expert). Allowed (on the border of the property) were 35 dB (rule of thumb: you should not hear it in the surrounding soundscape; note that this is a logarithmic scale so I think it's a factor of 6 or something)

It was especially bad when it had less than 8 degree Celsius because it would defrost every 30 minutes or so.

As I wrote before: location is also an important part: his house is hard walled, ours is a prefab house built out of wood. There are only 4 Meters between our houses, it was approx. 2 meters from our wall blowing in our direction. They only thing they could have made worse is putting it in a corner.

I didn't only hear it, I felt it.

In the end I managed to convince him that I pay an acoustic expert to explain to him that 65 dB is way louder than 35 dB and that putting an acoustic hood around it does not solve the problem (approx -10 db).

rompic··on Heat pumps, more than you wanted to know (2023)
My neighbour (illegally) put it right next to our house (between the walls of his houses and ours in a very dense area which is a very bad idea) and I basically had to move out for a few month in winter because sleeping was impossible, before I was able to convince him and get it moved (which I basically paid to be able to sleep again)
rompic··on Heat pumps, more than you wanted to know (2023)
Please note that they can also be very loud, especially the ones not built to be silent.
rompic··on Navajo Nation request to delay private mission placing human remains on the moon
Reminded me of that old joke: About 1966 or so, a NASA team doing work for the Apollo moon mission took the astronauts near Tuba City where the terrain of the Navajo Reservation looks very much like the Lunar surface. With all the trucks and large vehicles there were two large figures that were dressed in full Lunar spacesuits.

Near by a Navajo sheep herder and his son where watching the strange creatures walk about, occasionally being tended by personnel. The two Navajo people were noticed and approached by the NASA personnel. Since the man did not know English, his son asked for him what the strange creatures were and the NASA people told them that they are just men that are getting ready to go to the moon. The man became very excited and asked if he could send a message to the moon with the astronauts.

The NASA personnel thought this was a great idea so they rustled up a tape recorder. After the man gave them his message they asked his son to translate. His son would not.

Later, they tried a few more people on the reservation to translate, and every person they asked would chuckle and then refuse to translate. Finally, with cash in hand someone translated the message: "Watch out for these guys, they come to take your land."

Source: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/native-sun/

rompic··on Quairading shire erects signs telling travellers to ignore Google Maps
While I work at a company that, among other things, builds a navigation system (with a twist of doing load balancing on streets; called NUNAV Navigation), I'm not really an expert in this topic. From working with GIS and GPS quite a bit, I know though, that a lot of things, while they are working very well, are not as exact as they look (e.g. bad GPS signal, especially when driving with low speed, map matching, etc.)

Maybe someone else can comment in more detail.

rompic··on Quairading shire erects signs telling travellers to ignore Google Maps
20 Meters is quite short, so assuming a certain speed, there might only be a few GPS probes for each pass, that might also look as if they were outliers.
rompic··on 37c3 Live Streams
I'm looking forward to the talk about the "DRM" in polish trains

https://events.ccc.de/congress/2023/hub/en/event/breaking_dr...

rompic··on Rough.js: Create graphics with a hand-drawn, sketchy, appearance
Excalidraw supports that library according to this page, so I assume that they use it.

Update: indeed see e.g. https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw/issues/362

rompic··on Magic Earth: OSM based map and routing with crowd sourced traffic data
two things come to my mind: - use a capacity / slot based model to avoid heavy traffic on small roads - work together with cities / police etc. to define traffic strategies especially for events.

that's what we do at graphmasters with NUNAV: https://www.nunav.net/trafficStrategies

rompic··on Magic Earth: OSM based map and routing with crowd sourced traffic data
thanks for the feedback. I'll check with the developers.
rompic··on Magic Earth: OSM based map and routing with crowd sourced traffic data
yes. we are also (of course) a quite active contributor: see https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Graphmasters
rompic··on Magic Earth: OSM based map and routing with crowd sourced traffic data
It's on a very long list. Afaik it does exist on ios, but via-routing has low usage so it's not a high priority atm.
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