OopsCriticality

There isn't really a research exemption in the US. From your cited article, citing Madey v. Duke University (2002):

    The court did not reject the defense, but left only a "very
    narrow and strictly limited experimental use defense" for
    "amusement, to satisfy idle curiosity, or for strictly
    philosophical inquiry." The court also precludes the
    defense where, regardless of profit motive, the research 
    was done "in furtherance of the alleged infringer’s 
    legitimate business." In the case of a research university
    like Duke University, the court held that the alleged use
    was in furtherance of its legitimate business, and thus
    the defense was inapplicable.

Practically speaking, it's difficult to sue a university or an individual for patent infringement when they are conducting research without looking like a monster. Considering the costs of litigation, time wasted, hit to PR, nebulous damages to recover, etc., it doesn't sound very worthwhile. Legally speaking, one would appear to have case law on their side.

It has been held up in court, repeatedly, even against Duke University who argued in favor of an academic research exemption.

I wonder if this Night Shift feature has anything to do with the rumors of Apple switching to OLED displays for future phones. Reducing the amount of blue light emitted dusk to dawn would help extend the overall life of the panels.

Speaking of books, have you by chance read Weitz's new one? https://www.apress.com/9781484211779

I would disagree that those are similar since they don't have the same sight picture as the Guttersnipe.

Other than a nebulous "it works at short ranges and is snag-free", I can't point to point to anything quantitative. I think that's in part because the design is uncommon.

Trench sights show up every now and then (e.g., Colt New Agent), but the Guttersnipe is (and I think remains) unique in that the sight channel was tapered. For the sight picture, imagine a square divided into 4 triangles: left, right, and bottom would be from the sight, and the 4th would be an open triangle on the target. When sighting, one would balance the three sight triangles, and put the v notch that is formed on the target.

There are some that claim that simple geometrical shapes, like triangles, have a speed advantage in optimizing the sight alignment (e.g., Advantage Tactical with their "pyramid" shape, or Steyr's trapezoid sights) over the more familar notch and post. That sounds like something that should be easy to test, but I'm not aware of a well-conducted study (amateur or otherwise) that sheds useful light on the question.

Edit: Just occurred to me, the Guttersnipe does have a far shorter track length than conventional sights. Not sure how that is meaningful in practice though.

It's interesting to me that the Guttersnipe sighting system never really took off, especially with the increase in civilian concealed carry in the US.

Can anyone speak to the limitations for the tight spot the car will park into? Could there be a situation where the spot is tight enough that you can't get into the driver's seat?

I don't think we're on the same page.

> Software design is much better and more advanced, because our industry allows us to choose better practices.

I don't know what "much better and more advanced" is specifically referring to, but in the general sense, I see SDLC processes used in the stereotypical tech startup to be cargo cult appropriation from other more mature industries.

Being "patent pending" is meaningless without further context, i.e., the application proper. "Patent pending" spans a range of meaningless crud and novel inventions that share the common trait of having not yet received a final rejection office action.

> Automotive engineering is antediluvian wrt process compared to software engineering.

I couldn't disagree more strongly.

> Our design processes are far in advance of the automotive industry. Continuous design is normal practice. It's only the most careful (or most backward) shops that'll take months to update a design.

I'd say the latest trends in software engineering processes are actually adaptations of what has been practiced in the automotive sector (and other manufacturing sectors) for a long time, but outside of regulated industries, practiced with far less rigor. I don't think the claim that development processes in software are "more advanced" holds water (what does that even mean?).

It's impractical to practice continuous design on a physical product like a car so I think that's a poor point, but kaizen (which I will argue serves an analogous role) is certainly used throughout manufacturing and has origins in the TPS.

> The automotive industry, by comparison, regularly takes years to update a design even by a minor version. The best shops at this i.e. the F1 race teams can fix bugs in days, minor releases in months and, if this season is anything to go by, struggle horribly with major version upgrades.

Ignoring regulatory and documentation concerns, part of the reason it takes years to update a design is that the costs associated with producing a physical product are completely different from a pure software product. It's more cost effective to do good design work and heavy V&V of your design before you order tooling, rather than trying to modify your tooling (if it's even possible) after an error is discovered.

Are you suggesting that "rolling with the punches" on a civil engineering project is happening without going through some sort of an engineering change order process?

Because of gun-free zones, sometimes it's necessary to secure one's firearm in one's car.

Regardless of where I live, I keep a toolkit, trauma kit, and emergency supplies in the trunk… just in case. I also will have region specific stuff:

- When I lived in the great white north, I used to keep a snow shovel, cat litter, etc. in my car during the winter months.

- While I live in an arid desert, I keep extra gallons of water and a solar blanket in the car.

I really like knowing exactly where my car (and by extension) stuff is. Also, I hate having to readjust my mirrors and seat.

Ahh, that clears it up for me… nice example too. Thanks!

I thought that if one exceeded 70% utilization on a real-time system, one lost guarantees of being real-time?

They have none in my eyes. I used to email them pointing out simple factual errors in their articles (i.e., stuff that a quick Google or Wiki search would find). Never once received a response back. Almost always, there would be silent updates to their articles correcting the errors...

I refuse to succumb to Gell-Mann Amnesia: if Vox's quality control is crap on issues that are the small set I am informed on, then I am forced to conclude it's crap in other areas too. Aside from the QC failures, failing to clearly disclose the corrections strikes me as difficult to defend journalistically.

> By that I use our Nissan Leaf as an example. There is no direct mechanical linkage on any part of the car that makes it stop, go, or steer. Parking brake is electrically actuated. Brakes are run on a wire. "Gas" pedal is wire. I'm pretty sure the steering is drive-by-wire, but I'd have to go back and look it up to make the claim with confidence. I'm sure there are redundancies, but I'm picturing an ECU letting its smoke out and then you might as well just let go of the wheel and pray to your preferred deity.

This is not completely correct: your Leaf does have a purely electronic throttle and the e-brake is actuated by a solenoid, but no production passenger car presently uses brake-by-wire, and the first (and presently only) production passenger car with drive-by-wire is the Infiniti Q50. While your Leaf does have additional electronic braking means to make the regenerative system work, if the ECU lost its magic smoke the service brakes would still work. As to drive-by-wire (perhaps you're confused with electronic assist?), on the Q50 at least there is a physical linkage to the steering in case of electronic failure.

Your comment is kind, and appreciated. Thank you.

Are you aware of any implementations of that lottery model in the wild?

> regulatory bodies do not tend to support rapid iteration of products

I disagree. 21 CFR 820 is deliberately written such that it does not prescribe any one specific development process; AAMI TIR-45 for example aligns agile methodologies with medical device software development and is an FDA recognized consensus standard.

What regulatory bodies do demand is that one document what one will do, and then, actually do what one has documented. Sounds like Theranos had trouble with that.

> Your knowledge of the subject and willingness to explain it indicates to me that you're valuable to the HN community.

You're too charitable. The truth is I'm unemployed at what feels to be a particularly bad time of the year to be unemployed (think of all the family and friends get-togethers… "so, what do you do?"), and I'm bludgeoning people on the internet with domain knowledge in some lame effort to stroke ego rather than facing a bleak job market for someone of my background. It's a harsh toke, but admitting it (even pseudononymously) is the only way I'm going to do anything about it.

If it's okay, I think we should set the non-vertabrates aside for the discussion since their optical systems are so different.

As to the safety of UV-A, I don't think you're correct. A common element of all the comparative species selected is that their life span in the wild is far shorter than our own, and there isn't going to be selection pressure happening before they would accumulate UV damage. UV damage to the eye is kind of like yellowing of plastics, it accumulates over time. As is pointed out in your first linked article, aphakia patients are advised to wear blue-blocking glasses to protect their vision. My first thought as to how bad could it be was retinoblastoma—I am not aware of any studies looking at the incidence rate of Rb in aphakia patients and PubMed doesn't show anything either, but I don't think it's an unreasonable thought.

Aside from the ionization problem, UV light also has a much higher propensity towards scatter. Floaters are bad enough for some in visible light! Of course, we're talking futuristic gene augmentation, so it's not unreasonable to suggest we'd vacuum the eyes out every now and then, so maybe floaters will not be a problem :) We still have a problem with the much higher dispersion of UV light relative to visible, given the materials we have to work with in the eye; that, plus scatter, means we're probably going to have very fuzzy UV vision. Replace the whole lens system and maybe you get better UV-vis vision, but we still haven't overcome the safety problem. Maybe instead of vacuuming out the eyes, we just swap them out for a new autologous gene-tweaked set every couple years.

NIR would seem to be more realistic than UV (certainly considering safety), but here, the quantum efficiency of the pigments would seem to be a limiting factor. As you point out, we can already actually see a little into NIR (IIRC, in scotopic with something like 10-6 QE at 750nm relative to 555nm). At first glance, the chemical structure of human receptor pigments doesn't look to be super favorable for modification to getting something that would have a good absorption cross-section in NIR. Compare the structure of vitamin A or retinal with a strongly NIR-active chromophore, there's a lot of steps bridging the two and the structure as a whole is hostile towards selective modifications, not to speak of the rings where the modifications need to happen.

As to thermal IR, I think we'd need a metamaterial for something that would work in vis and in LWIR, and that's a handwavey statement on my part. It would definitely be of interest to the military!

Overall, I think it's more plausible to augment our vision by wiring a camera directly into our visual cortex. Biology is too hard.

My frustration was more directed towards the UV-Vis-NIR part (and I read night vision as thermal IR, but who knows), but I wouldn't say that your linked article is something of substance. To quote the article, quoting the experimenter/ee, "In Licina’s own words: 'Let’s be fair here. It’s kind of crap science.'"

I wouldn't even know where to begin in criticizing their study as disseminated on their website except to say it is completely unscientific. There are no proper controls, for one. I think it's wholly irresponsible of the press to report on this work in this fashion at such a premature stage. I respect the enthusiasm of the citizen science crowd and think it's a neat idea, but stuff like this is going to quickly earn it a very bad reputation.

Honestly, if this were reddit I would have deleted the entire post when scott_s pointed out it was harsh; it was hastily written in a moment of supreme frustration. Sorry!

> The next step, more controversial, would be super-vision of tetrachromacity, perhaps infra-red and ultra-violet sensitivity. Night vision glasses no longer needed for enhanced soldiers.

Utter poppycock.

The cornea and lens in humans are UV opaque, which is a very good thing because UV light is damaging. People without a lens (aphakia) are reported to perceive UV light, but this is otherwise an undesirable condition. As to infrared, some people can already see up to around 750nm or so (NIR) with awful quantum efficiency. Pit vipers and some fish have limited perception of IR, but I'm not aware of any animals that can see IR in the conventional sense… being warm blooded presents a real problem, for one.

Plainly, there are limits to what can be achieved in hyperspectral imaging due to materials, and that's without the constraints of biology thrown in the mix.

> I wonder how popular this viewpoint will be here on HN - the home of lifehacking and microanalysis of bodyfunction (often without the corresponding knowledge to go with it, but prefaced with a view that 'more data will always be better').

This would be what I see as the fundamental flaw behind Theranos, even if their technology worked (works?) as promised: the idea that more data will always be better is sophomoric (and I select that word judiciously, considering the founder). Evidence-based medicine clearly shows that more data does not, in itself, lead to a better outcome.

I can't speak to the ultimate legality of your idea, but I would guess that one would be arrested and it would be up to your lawyer to demonstrate that you were acting within the bounds of the law (if you were).

To your first question, I think it's fair to say that both NJ and NYC (and because of NYC, NY to a lesser extent) are generally perceived as being hostile towards firearms and general weapons ownership. If I were to predict states that restricted possession of an inoperable or antique firearm, NJ and NY would be at the top of my list, in that order.

To your second question, the appearance of the object has no bearing on it's legal status as a firearm (laws prohibiting look-alike objects notwithstanding). A pistol frame or lower receiver, incapable of being anything but a paperweight without all the other parts, is a firearm for legal purposes and would get one busted in the same manner as if it were a completely operational firearm.

Weapons laws are nuanced, pedantic, and frustrating. Frequently, they make no rational sense.

It happens in New Jersey too. What typically happens is there is an unexpected layover (say, due to weather), so the victims take possession of their luggage (with firearm) without malicious intent when they go to a hotel, and get arrested the following morning when checking in. In that situation, the proper (only?) course of action is to refuse to take possession of your checked luggage.

While traveling through a state, one is supposed to be protected by FOPA [0]. An uncharitable (technically correct but against the spirit) reading of the law is used by New Jersey and New York to harass gun owners, as in this case and in other more egregious cases.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearm_Owners_Protection_Act

Straight edge razors are kind of like cast iron pans: there is a little more upkeep, but the amount needed is blown out of proportion by enthusiasts on the internet. For myself (with corse hair) upkeep means a minute of stropping before every use, a couple of minutes on a pasted strop every other weekend or so, and a barber's hone once or twice a year. It's certainly more upkeep than anything with a replaceable blade, but I don't find it too onerous; actually, I take pride and satisfaction in maintaining my tools so the time spent is worth it to me. As to cutting oneself, I can count on one hand the number of times I've nicked myself in 20ish years with a straight razor.

Wow, I'm at a total loss to explain why my own experience differs so greatly from yours: using ToBS cream, I've got lather in half a minute and I've lathered, stropped, shaved, and cleaned up in 10… chalk it up to the diversity of human experiences I suppose.

Out of curiosity, did you ever try using distilled water? Alternatively, did you by chance give any of the traditional brushless products out there, like Musgo, a try? I use it while traveling and have had good luck with it.