Live data from Hacker News

I built a system that takes pictures of all the airplanes that fly over my house

twitter.com

141–150 of 192 posts

Re: I built a system that takes pictures of all the airplanes that fly over my house

#141
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some places they even listed your job!

In some countries, this is still true, with the addition of even your salary being public information.

I didn't know about the salary, what country is that? I'm curious

Re: I built a system that takes pictures of all the airplanes that fly over my house

#142
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in grandpa voice Back in my day, everyone’s address was listed in the phone book. If you wanted to remain anonymous, you had to pay a service charge to keep yourself from being listed!

In some places they even listed your job!

In Iceland you can put whatever you want as your job title (or degree) so you have people calling themselves beefcakes, lion tamers, tetris players etc. It helps to see if you have the right person.

Re: I built a system that takes pictures of all the airplanes that fly over my house

#143
post #61

If you add a laser pointer, you effectively built a low cost anti aircraft weapon. Very cool

If you add a laser pointer you'll effectively get yourself arrested within a few hours. Aircraft get laserd relatively often and it's dangerous to the pilots. We report it to air traffic control with an estimated location, they then coordinate with the police. Common practice is to turn off exterior lights when lasered, because it's just bored people with a laser pointer and they can't aim when the plane has no light…

Often? Hopefully it's just kids with no concept of the dangers involved. I don't understand why an adult would do such a thing.

Re: I built a system that takes pictures of all the airplanes that fly over my house

#144

I am not trying to be negative about what seems like Ana amazing project but I am genuinely curious: why? Is it the cool factor of being able to identify aircraft out of the sky with a camera? Being able to show the photos to someone (who?)? Asserting your rights to capture this data? Why would someone want to do this?

The way you wanted to phrase that question is, "Cool! Was there any other reason you wanted to build this beyond the technical challenge of it?" Otherwise it sounds like you're saying, "You need to get laid more, bro." This question is also handy at hackathons. Sometimes you get an answer like, "nope", other times you get anti-government screeds, sometimes dreams of saving the world once they've scaled up. Personally…

I think a guy capable of building an automatic plane spotting system gets laid. I mean.. if not, what's wrong with the world?

Re: I built a system that takes pictures of all the airplanes that fly over my house

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some countries, this is still true, with the addition of even your salary being public information.

I didn't know about the salary, what country is that? I'm curious

Norway is one such country (https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239) but I think some others in the Nordics also does the same, not sure exactly which though and Google is not being very helpful this evening.

Re: I built a system that takes pictures of all the airplanes that fly over my house

#146
That's incredible, what a great idea! I read some instructable a long time ago, but forgot to bookmark it, where someone was using an ADS-B receiver and raspberry pi to display a faux radar screen image of azimuth and altitude of planes nearby.

This approach is even better!

Re: I built a system that takes pictures of all the airplanes that fly over my house

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so how long before someone looks at those flights, times and maps out your exact house address?

in grandpa voice Back in my day, everyone’s address was listed in the phone book. If you wanted to remain anonymous, you had to pay a service charge to keep yourself from being listed!

When I was a kid, nobody thought it was anything unusual to have a reporter from the local newspaper come out to your house and write an article with your home address and phone number.

And now those articles are searchable on newspapers.com!

I do have to admit it was fun finding my mom's old Red Cross activities and my dad's chess tournaments. Any chess players remember Sammy Reshevsky? He was a friend of my dad's and would sometimes stay with us when he visited Eugene for a chess tournament.

Re: I built a system that takes pictures of all the airplanes that fly over my house

#148

Useful idea for usage: Point a WiFi-dish/antenna towards the plane and gather WiFi & Bluetooth MAC addresses for all the passengers. Now you can make statistics about the number of passengers, how long /often they travel ++ good information if you want to trade stocks in airplane companies. You can direct the antenna precisely because you have the image recognition in addition to GPS.

You can also provide the plane with WiFi access this way. A passenger can easily activate WiFi in combination with Airplane Mode on most phones (including iPhone)

Re: I built a system that takes pictures of all the airplanes that fly over my house

#150

Hi! I am the guy behind this, awesome to see it posted here. Happy to answer any questions. To answer a question I saw pop up, I am using the FAA aircraft registration data to pull up the extra information about the planes. It lists who actually owns the plane, vs who is operating it. That is why you see so many banks. Places like Flightaware have much better data, but a pricy to look up.

Ok, so how long before someone looks at those flights, times and maps out your exact house address?

Given that the image is cropped and it's hard to tell which part of the frame the cropping is for, I think you can easily guess which airport this is nearby, but definitely not at the house or even street precision.
Post reply on HN