Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My phone replaced a brass plug

drobinin.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 60 posts

Re: My phone replaced a brass plug

#51

Post by teiferer »

throw310822 wrote: post #41
krisoft wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where do you see that? There are multiple mentions of him being motivated by wanting to shoot deer for meat. It is a through line via the article. > The article is about someone in Scotland who took up marksmanship as a hobby. I wish it were so. With a bit more self awareness the author could have said “initially picked up a rifle to learn to hunt deer, but doing so i learned how targets are scored and become inter…

The guy is clearly an obsessive hyper-perfectionist- he's telling (or boasting) of taking a culinary obsession from reproducing fine-dining dishes (when most people are content mastering a few decent recipes) to building automates curing chambers and butchering whole animals. It's kind of obvious that this personality leads from any random objective to into the deepest of the rabbit holes where everything is studied…

Point is that sub-millimeter precision when measuring rings is doing absolutely nothing to further his shooting skills to take down a tasty deer. To the contrary. Time is limited, and every minute spent perfecting this automation was not spent improving shooting skills by, you know, shooting. In other words, this may well have made him a worse shooter than he could have been. Nothing wrong with it, but let's call it for what it is.

A perfectionist defines a goal and then finds the perfect path to get there. He was just giving in to distractions and "perfectionist" is the wrong label.

Re: My phone replaced a brass plug

#52

Post by Ancapistani »

teiferer wrote: post #22
Ancapistani wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> His objective is not to participate in the Olympics but to shoot deer. Where do you see that? The article is about someone in Scotland who took up marksmanship as a hobby.

The article literally starts with "I wanted to cook venison from scratch, which meant learning to shoot"

Maybe it’s just that I identify so strongly with the author in that way, then - I saw that, but didn’t see it as a rationale for the rest of the article. It was just “here’s the path that led to my picking up marksmanship as an interest”.

Re: My phone replaced a brass plug

#53

Post by valzevul »

Ancapistani wrote: post #52
teiferer wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article literally starts with "I wanted to cook venison from scratch, which meant learning to shoot"

Maybe it’s just that I identify so strongly with the author in that way, then - I saw that, but didn’t see it as a rationale for the rest of the article. It was just “here’s the path that led to my picking up marksmanship as an interest”.

No, that's fair (OP here) - I went to the range to learn how to hold the rifle in the first place, but indoor shooting with .22 from 25 yards in a stiff shooting jacket is as far from shooting a deer with .243 as it gets, so I stayed for the fun of it and the community around it.

I would definitely get to the point of stalking deer faster if I were to book a few 1-1 sessions at an outdoor range instead, but "faster" was never the point.

Re: My phone replaced a brass plug

#54

Post by valzevul »

teiferer wrote: post #51
throw310822 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The guy is clearly an obsessive hyper-perfectionist- he's telling (or boasting) of taking a culinary obsession from reproducing fine-dining dishes (when most people are content mastering a few decent recipes) to building automates curing chambers and butchering whole animals. It's kind of obvious that this personality leads from any random objective to into the deepest of the rabbit holes where everything is studied…

Point is that sub-millimeter precision when measuring rings is doing absolutely nothing to further his shooting skills to take down a tasty deer. To the contrary. Time is limited, and every minute spent perfecting this automation was not spent improving shooting skills by, you know, shooting. In other words, this may well have made him a worse shooter than he could have been. Nothing wrong with it, but let's call it…

It's not about submillimetre precision (OP here), it's about knowing if you can shoot well. The most common deer stalking certification in the UK (DSC1) involves three shooting tests from 20, 70, and 100m - if I don't care about 8/10 vs 9/10 shots from 25 yards, there is no way I am putting a shot within a 4" circle from 100 metres.

> every minute spent perfecting this automation was not spent improving shooting skills by, you know, shooting

I mention in the post that I had access to the range only 1-2 evenings a week, so there was no way I could improve my skills outside of these few hours.

Re: My phone replaced a brass plug

#55

Post by cindyllm »

teiferer wrote: post #51
throw310822 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The guy is clearly an obsessive hyper-perfectionist- he's telling (or boasting) of taking a culinary obsession from reproducing fine-dining dishes (when most people are content mastering a few decent recipes) to building automates curing chambers and butchering whole animals. It's kind of obvious that this personality leads from any random objective to into the deepest of the rabbit holes where everything is studied…

Point is that sub-millimeter precision when measuring rings is doing absolutely nothing to further his shooting skills to take down a tasty deer. To the contrary. Time is limited, and every minute spent perfecting this automation was not spent improving shooting skills by, you know, shooting. In other words, this may well have made him a worse shooter than he could have been. Nothing wrong with it, but let's call it…

[dead]

Re: My phone replaced a brass plug

#57

Post by valzevul »

thinkingemote wrote: post #56
greg_dc wrote: post #40

Huh! Fellow Edinburgh resident here. I had no idea there was a rifle range here.

There are quite a few around the country but they are literally underground. You generally fire the guns in a tunnel.

There are a few outdoor ranges around Edinburgh but they focus on clay shooting and shotguns. I think there are one or two rifle ranges in town but they only accept students.

The one I went to is indoors, although not a tunnel but a Nissen hut [1].

--

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissen_hut

Re: My phone replaced a brass plug

#58

Post by teiferer »

valzevul wrote: post #54
teiferer wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point is that sub-millimeter precision when measuring rings is doing absolutely nothing to further his shooting skills to take down a tasty deer. To the contrary. Time is limited, and every minute spent perfecting this automation was not spent improving shooting skills by, you know, shooting. In other words, this may well have made him a worse shooter than he could have been. Nothing wrong with it, but let's call it…

It's not about submillimetre precision (OP here), it's about knowing if you can shoot well. The most common deer stalking certification in the UK (DSC1) involves three shooting tests from 20, 70, and 100m - if I don't care about 8/10 vs 9/10 shots from 25 yards, there is no way I am putting a shot within a 4" circle from 100 metres. > every minute spent perfecting this automation was not spent improving shooting skil…

Thanks for joining the discussion!

> if I don't care about 8/10 vs 9/10 shots from 25 yards, there is no way I am putting a shot within a 4" circle from 100 metres.

Totally with you there. Though isn't what counts in the end how close you were to the center? If you look with your eyes and it looks like it was in the 3rd ring, what does it matter whether it "technically" wasn't because half a millimeter was in the next ring? It was surely much better shot than fully in the next one, unless you actually want to go to the olympics or are otherwise competing in the sport.

Don't get me wrong, I totally respect the challenge of automating the counting but that this actually helped your progress still seems doubtful to me.

> I mention in the post that I had access to the range only 1-2 evenings a week, so there was no way I could improve my skills outside of these few hours

Ok, fair. Though we can surely agree that even though the automation-building that you did during all this extra time improved your skills, it was coding skills rather than shooting skills? (Which, again, is fantastic!)

Re: My phone replaced a brass plug

#60

Post by saaaaaam »

duozerk wrote: post #34
saaaaaam wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it’s a great title. It was curious enough that I clicked and then I read the whole thing. It’s unlikely I would have done that if it had been something like “Using computer vision to score rifle shooting cards”.

In other words it's a great clickbait title, yet still a bad title.

No - just because a title inspires curiosity doesn’t mean it is clickbait. Clickbait titles are urgent and generally either over-egg something or are misleading.

This was just a good title.

Thinking about this a little more: the reason I opened and read the piece was because it inspired questions. First of all, a phone and a brass plug are conceptually different things. So immediately I thought “how can a phone replace a plug? What sort of plug?” Then I thought more about plugs - is it a bath plug? An electrical plug? This doesn’t make sense! How can a phone replace a plug? And then the specific fact it was a BRASS plug made me even more curious. What sort of plugs are made from brass? It’s a strange and specific thing to make a plug from… there’s clearly something I’m missing here and I’d like to find out more. So then I opened the piece, and the quality of the writing meant that, invested in the question as I already was, I didn’t really mind that the answer wasn’t immediate. I was prepared to go on the journey the writer had contradicted for me to find what I needed to know.

That’s why it’s a great title, because the questions it prompted meant that by the time I clicked and started reading I was already mentally invested in the journey.

Post reply on HN