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tsbischofon An interactive map of Flock Cams

If you want to explore navigation I made an app: https://alprwatch.org/navigation. It works fully offline, you just need to download the maps and overlays

tsbischofon An interactive map of Flock Cams

I made a version which does the avoidance dynamically at runtime, works for any tracks you want to use: https://alprwatch.org/navigation. It works fully offline after you download the maps and overlays

tsbischofon alpr.watch

Different datasets. deflock.me is for ALPR locations, alpr.watch shows where local government meetings are taking place

tsbischofon How Cops Are Using Flock's ALPR Network to Surveil Protesters and Activists

Yup, about 100k installed vs about 40k mapped

tsbischofon Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

About 40k new cameras each year from what I have seen.

If you find yourself with some time, there is now a DeFlock app that helps with mapping. It also includes locations where people suspect there might be a camera, though that is limited to about a third of the states so far.

tsbischofon Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

https://eyesonflock.com/ is the closest to an actual searchable version

tsbischofon Munich's surfers left stunned after famed river wave vanishes

Give it a week and check back, the surfers are a strong community and there is public support for getting the wave back

tsbischofon Find Nearby Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR)

I will be surprised if there is not a startup in the coming years that pays you to run a surveillance mining app that shares data as a way to subsidize the cost of the hardware. The surveillance state equivalent of ads

tsbischofon Find Nearby Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR)

It is specifically Flock. For a bit of data, check around page 110 of this report on data sharing between camera operators: https://cdn.muckrock.com/foia_files/2025/07/23/JCSO_Agency_S...

tsbischofon Find Nearby Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR)

Why accept surveillance and tracking without a narrow and well-defined scope? It is one thing to track cars for estimating traffic velocity, it is another entirely to create a national database of all locations any given individual has been seen, with minimal oversight to the purpose for collecting and using that data.

tsbischofon Find Nearby Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR)

Possible, but there are plenty of instances of that sort of layout.

One way to cross-correlate is to pull 811 records. This map overlays the Deflock data with 811 locations: https://alprwatch.org/flock/utilities/

tsbischofon Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)

I track the installation and use of ALPR systems: https://alprwatch.org/

tsbischofon Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)

An app to screen properties based on your own esoteric criteria. Things like, "I want to have a balcony facing south, looking at a park." Then you can send a list of suitable properties to a real estate agent to scout, or set a notification in case any of them come into the market

tsbischofon Zuckerberg's Grand Vision: Most of Your Friends Will Be AI

Where do you turn for a variety of opinions, activities, and social interactions over the long term? There is incredible value in growing alongside people over a period of time and acting as a mutual support network

tsbischofon Kids can't use computers and this is why it should worry you (2013)

Absolutely not an exaggeration. I have encountered masters students who balked at the idea of opening a file in Python, despite that ostensibly being their language of choice for a machine learning class. The concept of where the data physically resided was also a mystery to them

tsbischofon Ask HN: Which RSS reader do you use?

https://www.theoldreader.com

Great reader, I have been using it since Google Reader went away.

tsbischofon LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed

https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents

tsbischofon Technology holy wars are coordination problems (2020)

One of the big changes was to make many basic tools into lazy iterators instead of greedy lists (map, filter, range, etc.). I can remember having to teach my fellow scientist/engineer colleagues not to just loop over an index variable when working with certain datasets, but this was a major bit of friction because they were so used to Matlab and other languages where direct indexing is the primary method. While lazy execution is great for many things, it is not something that is necessarily common knowledge among people who use coding as a means to an end.

Additionally, because so many of the core libraries were 32-bit only or Python 2 only, you ended up having to either write your own version of them or just go back to 32-bit Python 2. Numpy in particular (and therefore transitively anything halfway useful for science and engineering) took several years to stabilize and I have many memories of having to dig into things like https://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/ to get unofficial but viable builds going for the Windows machines we used. It was enough of a pain to deal with dependencies that I actually ended up rolling my own ndarray class that was horrendous but just good enough to get the job done.

tsbischofon AWS Works Council Germany

That depends heavily on the organization. Our works council technically approves hires but realistically has little influence on most decisions

tsbischofon Calls to investigate tax sites for sharing financial information with Meta

So collect the data? In Germany it is standard to classify workers based on marital and child status[0]

[0] https://neotax.eu/en/blog/tax-classes-steuerklassen-in-germa...

tsbischofon A petabyte of health insurance prices per month

It partly arises as a mechanism to pay per case, not just per visit. For example, if we put all payment for a breast cancer treatment into the first visit, there is now an incentive to either complete the treatment (ideal) or keep the patient from coming back (less ideal). You can use these follow-up codes to measure rates of return visits, which can be related to quality of care metrics.

tsbischofon Google Street View returns to Germany after 10 Years

And yet it is one of the few places where it is mandatory to have your name on the publicly-facing postbox in order for mail to arrive. The privacy sentiment here is all over the place.

tsbischofon Ask HN: What do you put in a “in case of death” file?

A friend of mine founded a company in this space (https://www.joincake.com/). From what I know it is more on the side of helping you build your own solution, rather than delivering all of the technical aspects.

The technical integration would be some significant effort to work out: do you need to run a credential management service? Can you get away with just having account recovery codes, specifying beneficiaries for specific accounts, etc? At first glance it feels like a massive amount of integration work would be needed

tsbischofon Ask HN: How do you approach a problem you are not sure has a solution?

I fantasize about this sometimes for scientific purposes. Part of the challenge is how to keep the barrier to entry low enough that people stay excited and creative, because the opposite is the world of regulated industries where your way of thinking is heavily influenced by the legal framework. Periodic synchronization helps and the best I have seen in person at the Gordon Research Conferences (GRC) since these tend to be narrow enough to have consensus but still broad enough to get a little bit of perspective

tsbischofon Ask HN: How do you approach a problem you are not sure has a solution?

This is quite common in scientific research. The typical algorithm I follow is to reframe the problem in the language of different fields and see whether there is a more useful way of tackling it in that framework. There are always some leaks in the abstraction/translation but often by reframing the problem you find a good-enough solution.

tsbischofon Walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees

It's been a few years and I know it depends on the exact journal, but I thought Elsevier had paid editors? My memory is that society journals tend to be unpaid but that Elsevier, Nature, Frontiers, etc. had paid editors.

tsbischofon Walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees

It's definitely been my experience that reviews are hit-or-miss. Sometimes you get 1-2 reviews where there are valid points that need to be addressed, sometimes you wait 3 months for the reviews to come back, only to find that reviewers 2 and 3 dropped out and reviewer 1 basically said "looks fine".

Part of the challenge of peer review is that it comes _after_ the paper is written, when the cost of changing anything is quite high. I find much more value in peer review when planning experiments, and do so informally with my peers.

tsbischofon Walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees

They also manage the review process (screen papers, find reviewers, communicate with authors and reviewers), make sure that papers are accessible long-term (decades to centuries), typeset manuscripts, print paper issues, and several other tasks.

But yes, reviewers are not paid. A half-decent review can easily take 3-4 hours, and a typical paper gets 2-3 reviews, so something like 8-12 hours of PhD-level labor which are not currently compensated.

tsbischofon Walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees

There are several open access solutions but few (if any?) open source solutions. Arxiv is free but lacks reputation outside a small number of fields. PLOS One has a decent reputation in some fields and probably comes closest in being good value.

I know a couple of people working in this space, and ultimately it ends up being a networking issue: in order to get peer reviewers at a scale which is acceptable, you basically have to buy editors with networks of contacts. Since good or even mediocre reviewers are scarce, this ends up leading to significant competition for reviews. But reviewers are not compensated so there is no market pressure for reviewers to actually exist. Publishing is now a profit-driven system built on top of an informal network created by enthusiasts who were originally doing the work because it was important to them.

There have been a couple of attempts at matchmaking systems and rewards systems. https://www.reviewcommons.org/ is the most visible in my field, but they only get 1-2 preprint reviews out per day so far. This is still quite new and there are a couple of other platforms in development.

tsbischofon Offline is just online with extreme latency

I issues with Outlook Web App (M365) often. Dropped characters are not so common, but it is common for the cursor to bug out and insist on returning the to start of a line with each new character.