HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

wintermutesGhst

43 karma · joined March 2, 2018

submissionscomments
wintermutesGhst··on The end of the manual transmission is near?
Pedestrian airbags have been designed before, but don't seem to have caught on widely [1].

A more bizarre solution Google patented always stuck with me: A sticky car hood beneath an eggshell coating so that a struck pedestrian would stay on top of the car instead of falling and hitting their head or being run over [2].

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiiBlirAG8w

2: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a20953/google-pa...

wintermutesGhst··on 400-year-old Greenland shark ‘longest-living vertebrate’ (2016)
Perhaps it is an example of Cunningham's Law?
wintermutesGhst··on Researcher questions years of his own work with a reexamination of fMRI data
Well, the issue is that if you accept that brain state will always be different then there isn't much predictive power in the measure.

The conceit was always that you could measure it across a bunch of people and find the commonly active areas across enough datasets. Even with different baselines, the areas critical to the task would elevate above that baseline.

This paper finds that even in a single person, activity (above the baseline) is poorly correlated across recording sessions. They use a technique called intraclass correlation to measure this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intraclass_correlation

wintermutesGhst··on New sense discovered in dog noses: the ability to detect heat
I think degree of sensitivity, discrimination, or directionality can warrant counting a 'new sense'. I would consider my sense of thermoreception to be different from that of a snake's heat-pits, or hearing to be a different sense from feeling vibrations.
wintermutesGhst··on Why Physicists Tried to Put a Ferret in a Particle Accelerator
It looks like it may be an antiquated term?

From the National Accelerator Laboratory Groundbreaking press release:

"Groundbreaking will be held Sunday, December 1, 1968, near here for the first permanent building in the research complex of the National Accelerator Laboratory (NAL) where the 200 Billion Electron Volt (BeV) accelerator will be located." [http://history.fnal.gov/groundbreaking.html]

wintermutesGhst··on How much Americans make in wages
This idea really resonates with me, and is a notion I've been working through without really having words that express it.

Could you share the untranslated phrase if I wanted to read more about it?

wintermutesGhst··on Voice Phishing Scams Are Getting More Clever
The insecurity comes from the fact that once a call is in the network, it is mostly passed off without validation or verification. You only need to find someone willing to carry your call in to the network, and the rest takes care of itself.

To change the routing of a call other than yours would require you to access a carrier's systems and change where the call is routed to--which is substantially more difficult.

wintermutesGhst··on Voice Phishing Scams Are Getting More Clever
Having spent a bit of time working on projects that touch the phone network, I think it is a 'major nightmare' in the Lovecraftian sense--I for one am forever changed by what I saw.

As for billing, it is usually based on the destination number, and your originating telco, unless I am misunderstanding your question.

wintermutesGhst··on Interrobang
I notice this on occasion when people are speaking a language I do understand, but I miss a syllable or two when they begin speaking. The rest of their speech might as well be another language as it all runs together incomprehensibly. I cannot parse the whole sentence after missing the prompt at the beginning, and cannot even separate where the words split.
wintermutesGhst··on Reduce GPS data error on Android with Kalman filter and accelerometer
Neat article covering a lot of topics, but I'm fairly surprised by these results.

At one point I was looking at building a navigation module for a car using a similar setup to smooth noise, but after some searching I found a paper which showed essentially no benefit from the accelerometer/gyro. The 'drift' on the accelerometer meant it could only filter very fast changes, which the Kalman filter on the GPS board already handled quite well.

I should dig out my little MTK3339 and try to replicate!

wintermutesGhst··on FCC Accuses Stealthy Startup of Launching Rogue Satellites
Very interesting--thanks for the reply.

I sometimes forget there are problems out there that for all our analytic tools are 'too hard' to give an good (read: short) answer.

I'll have to go properly digging for some papers, though it's been a few years since I had to read differential equations...

wintermutesGhst··on FCC Accuses Stealthy Startup of Launching Rogue Satellites
Do you have any links with more analysis on the problem today?

Kessler syndrome is something I always see discussed, but I don't really have any idea how large/proximal the issue is. Is this a 10-years risk? 100? 1000? Purely hypothetical?

wintermutesGhst··on Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison
That is the issue though, someone has to decide whether to "throw the book at you" or not. As long as someone is left to decide that, then you risk things like "being offensive" working against you, or "showing remorse" helping you.

The allowance for empathy, compassion and mistakes are what lead to the (to you) unfair punishment that was given.

wintermutesGhst··on Prove you are not an evil corporate person
Further, we don't know the value. Thought seems cheap to us, but it is clearly valuable to the companies that use it. How do we know it is a fair deal without knowing our thoughts' worth?

It seems unfair to ask us to trade for glass beads.

wintermutesGhst··on Prove you are not an evil corporate person
It is always easiest to blame 'the people' for making bad decisions and enabling systems we disagree with, but you are right that this is a mistake. More important is addressing the predatory nature of the systems that makes them successful.

When there is only one option being sold to you (the 'free' one), what choice do you have? And when you don't really know the cost you are paying (because who knows the true value of any piece of data you provide), then how could you know if you are paying a fair price?

wintermutesGhst··on For Two Months, I Got My News from Print Newspapers
This is an interesting idea for understanding how different worldviews form.

Possibly also how sentiments like "facts have a liberal bias" or "liberals live in a fantasy" come about and ring true. The set of facts you use to judge who/what is 'in-frame' are essential to your understanding of the world. Someone else who treats those facts as optional ("Sure they don't believe in global warming, but they understand the issues with immigration") clearly has a poor understanding of "how the world works".

wintermutesGhst··on Continuing frequency deviation in the Continental European Power System
This is what I wondered, is network topology carefully arranged to avoid triangular connections, or 'loops' where a generator could interfere (indirectly) with itself?
wintermutesGhst··on Continuing frequency deviation in the Continental European Power System
My confusion always comes when I try to think of it as a propagating wave.

If instead of a tandem bicycle, it is a very long rope that someone is moving up and down, then when I try to join some distance away there will seem to be a wave passing me. Even if I join in at the correct phase, I will also be generating a wave traveling back to the first 'generator' and interfering with the existing wave along the way. With the right distance and relative strength then we will produce a standing wave between us. Is there an apparent 'direction' to the wave of electric potential in a large grid?

Then there is the issue of triangular arrangements the sibling comment raised, when the radial distances and relative phases don't align.

Maybe my issue is always trying to think through physical analogues I can 'see'.

wintermutesGhst··on Contributing to OpenMined: Summing up 3 months with the community
Looks like a welcoming project with lot of good information for new contributors on the Github.

Unfortunately all the project's Slack links I can find (including this one) seem to be expired.