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

When an experiment with existing technology does a “good enough” job

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 95 posts

Re: When an experiment with existing technology does a “good enough” job

#21

Post by wallace_f »

shadowtree wrote: post #3

Any project in a heavily regulated environment is not measurable that way. The cost comes from compliance, audits, paperwork. Trials, PoCs, etc. You also need to prove security and a long term lifecycle for the solution. Those open source packages - are they being updated? Who validates patches? etc etc. Those are moats, once you're able to deliver the above, you're set for a long time. Good luck!

Oh come on. Not all heavy-handed regulation would pass a cost-benefit analysis. Nor does it cost 80 million to run some POCs and QA on a project like this.

At nearly 400,000 AUD per vehicle, the question should be what better opportunities to help people did the Australian Govt pass up in order to engage this project?

Re: When an experiment with existing technology does a “good enough” job

#22

Post by cdfgg »

mintplant wrote: post #16

> Although, the solution would occasionally have issues with particular letters. A mistake like this can and has destroyed lives. http://thisiscriminal.com/episode-18-695bgk/ > Police officer John Edwards was patrolling a quiet neighborhood in Bellaire, Texas when he saw an SUV driven by two young African-American men. It was just before 2am on December 31, 2008. Edwards followed the SUV and ran the license plate num…

isn't it because the officer type wrong license? i thought the scanner purpose is to minimize human error like this

Re: When an experiment with existing technology does a “good enough” job

#23

Post by fao_ »

panic wrote: post #18
mintplant wrote: post #16

> Although, the solution would occasionally have issues with particular letters. A mistake like this can and has destroyed lives. http://thisiscriminal.com/episode-18-695bgk/ > Police officer John Edwards was patrolling a quiet neighborhood in Bellaire, Texas when he saw an SUV driven by two young African-American men. It was just before 2am on December 31, 2008. Edwards followed the SUV and ran the license plate num…

I'm not sure the license plate scanner is the one to blame here. Since when does stealing a car carry a death sentence?

Exactly, the fault lies with the trigger-happy police, not with the software.

Re: When an experiment with existing technology does a “good enough” job

#24

Post by anitil »

mintplant wrote: post #16

> Although, the solution would occasionally have issues with particular letters. A mistake like this can and has destroyed lives. http://thisiscriminal.com/episode-18-695bgk/ > Police officer John Edwards was patrolling a quiet neighborhood in Bellaire, Texas when he saw an SUV driven by two young African-American men. It was just before 2am on December 31, 2008. Edwards followed the SUV and ran the license plate num…

This sort of thing doesn't really happen in Aus. I could see someone getting arrested and spending a night in jail unnecessarily or maaaaaaybe tased (and to be clear, whether we consider this a fair price to pay is a different question), but police rarely shoot people here.

Re: When an experiment with existing technology does a “good enough” job

#25

Post by anitil »

taitems wrote: post #20

Author here, hi HN/Reddit. I had hoped I'd made it clear enough, but by no means am I recommending something I cobbled together in an hour on the couch be rolled out as a competitor to BlueNet. I mean shit, I'm web scraping their database and using compressed footage from cheap dashcams. The algorithm is also untrained. I was, on the other hand, hoping to promote healthy discussion and pose some good questions relate…

Great article, loved it.

Re: When an experiment with existing technology does a “good enough” job

#26

Post by taitems »

anitil wrote: post #14
shadowtree wrote: post #3

Any project in a heavily regulated environment is not measurable that way. The cost comes from compliance, audits, paperwork. Trials, PoCs, etc. You also need to prove security and a long term lifecycle for the solution. Those open source packages - are they being updated? Who validates patches? etc etc. Those are moats, once you're able to deliver the above, you're set for a long time. Good luck!

You're very right. At a quick glance, this thing is going to need power, probably from the car battery. You don't want it to catch fire and kill the occupants, so there's going to be R&D in power supplies, material etc, along with regulation and testing.

Emergency services vehicles run so much equipment they have isolated power from engine power.

Re: When an experiment with existing technology does a “good enough” job

#27

Post by mintplant »

fao_ wrote: post #23
panic wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure the license plate scanner is the one to blame here. Since when does stealing a car carry a death sentence?

Exactly, the fault lies with the trigger-happy police, not with the software.

Of course. But it is precisely this "trigger-happy" nature which makes an introducing a system with an appreciable error rate dangerous. This at least partially (partially) accounts for higher costs.

Re: When an experiment with existing technology does a “good enough” job

#28

Post by analognoise »

You can't say it's expensive without knowing the requirements - this is not only misleading, but it says something negative about the overall level of discourse we have.

"Why did this system cost 86 million dollars" would be much more informative. It could be that the whole thing is a waste, but that would require an actual analysis.

Re: When an experiment with existing technology does a “good enough” job

#29

Post by Johnny555 »

Imagine a passive system scanning fellow motorists for an abductors car that automatically alerts authorities and family members to their current location and direction.

That's the same argument that police departments use "Well we'll only use it to capture child abductors and stolen cars and stuff".

But the truth is that there just aren't that many real child abductors out there (especially with known license plates -- and when they are known, it tends to be a child-custody dispute rather than a stranger-abduction), and meanwhile a huge database of every driver's whereabouts is being amassed with no good controls over who owns the data or what it's used for.

I'm surprised companies aren't offering the service for free in return for the database. There must be huge marketing possibilities... John Doe drives past this oil change place twice a day, let's send him a coupon, or better... John Doe's car goes to Jane Smith's house twice a week and parks there for two hours, let's send his wife an ad for a private investigator.

Re: When an experiment with existing technology does a “good enough” job

#30

Post by taitems »

Johnny555 wrote: post #29

Imagine a passive system scanning fellow motorists for an abductors car that automatically alerts authorities and family members to their current location and direction. That's the same argument that police departments use "Well we'll only use it to capture child abductors and stolen cars and stuff". But the truth is that there just aren't that many real child abductors out there (especially with known license plates…

Oh dear. That's so creepy someone might actually do it!

I'm getting into home automation at the moment, so a use case that I think I deleted from the article was just letting you know that your mum or someone had pulled up in the driveway. License plates vs. a known list of visitors. Or as is happening here in some of our suburbs, "Alert: A group of 4 men have arrived in a stolen V8 Commodore"

Post reply on HN