Hacker News: tsbischof

New comment by tsbischof in "An interactive map of Flock Cams"

tsbischof — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 06:00:25 +0000

If you want to explore navigation I made an app: https://alprwatch.org/navigation. It works fully offline, you just need to download the maps and overlays

New comment by tsbischof in "An interactive map of Flock Cams"

tsbischof — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 05:58:24 +0000

I made a version which does the avoidance dynamically at runtime, works for any tracks you want to use: https://alprwatch.org/navigation. It works fully offline after you download the maps and overlays

New comment by tsbischof in "alpr.watch"

tsbischof — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 20:29:28 +0000

Different datasets. deflock.me is for ALPR locations, alpr.watch shows where local government meetings are taking place

New comment by tsbischof in "How Cops Are Using Flock's ALPR Network to Surveil Protesters and Activists"

tsbischof — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 11:48:12 +0000

Yup, about 100k installed vs about 40k mapped

New comment by tsbischof in "Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests"

tsbischof — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 19:03:38 +0000

About 40k new cameras each year from what I have seen.

If you find yourself with some time, there is now a DeFlock app that helps with mapping. It also includes locations where people suspect there might be a camera, though that is limited to about a third of the states so far.

New comment by tsbischof in "Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests"

tsbischof — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 19:01:07 +0000

https://eyesonflock.com/ is the closest to an actual searchable version

New comment by tsbischof in "Munich's surfers left stunned after famed river wave vanishes"

tsbischof — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 07:07:17 +0000

Give it a week and check back, the surfers are a strong community and there is public support for getting the wave back

New comment by tsbischof in "Find Nearby Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR)"

tsbischof — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 13:27:04 +0000

I will be surprised if there is not a startup in the coming years that pays you to run a surveillance mining app that shares data as a way to subsidize the cost of the hardware. The surveillance state equivalent of ads

New comment by tsbischof in "Find Nearby Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR)"

tsbischof — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 12:47:09 +0000

It is specifically Flock. For a bit of data, check around page 110 of this report on data sharing between camera operators: https://cdn.muckrock.com/foia_files/2025/07/23/JCSO_Agency_S...

New comment by tsbischof in "Find Nearby Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR)"

tsbischof — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 11:10:31 +0000

Why accept surveillance and tracking without a narrow and well-defined scope? It is one thing to track cars for estimating traffic velocity, it is another entirely to create a national database of all locations any given individual has been seen, with minimal oversight to the purpose for collecting and using that data.

New comment by tsbischof in "Find Nearby Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR)"

tsbischof — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 09:46:45 +0000

Possible, but there are plenty of instances of that sort of layout.

One way to cross-correlate is to pull 811 records. This map overlays the Deflock data with 811 locations: https://alprwatch.org/flock/utilities/

New comment by tsbischof in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)"

tsbischof — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 11:22:17 +0000

I track the installation and use of ALPR systems: https://alprwatch.org/

New comment by tsbischof in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)"

tsbischof — Tue, 27 May 2025 11:00:44 +0000

An app to screen properties based on your own esoteric criteria. Things like, "I want to have a balcony facing south, looking at a park." Then you can send a list of suitable properties to a real estate agent to scout, or set a notification in case any of them come into the market

New comment by tsbischof in "Zuckerberg's Grand Vision: Most of Your Friends Will Be AI"

tsbischof — Wed, 07 May 2025 13:22:15 +0000

Where do you turn for a variety of opinions, activities, and social interactions over the long term? There is incredible value in growing alongside people over a period of time and acting as a mutual support network

New comment by tsbischof in "Kids can't use computers and this is why it should worry you (2013)"

tsbischof — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 06:02:52 +0000

Absolutely not an exaggeration. I have encountered masters students who balked at the idea of opening a file in Python, despite that ostensibly being their language of choice for a machine learning class. The concept of where the data physically resided was also a mystery to them

New comment by tsbischof in "Ask HN: Which RSS reader do you use?"

tsbischof — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 17:54:10 +0000

https://www.theoldreader.com

Great reader, I have been using it since Google Reader went away.

New comment by tsbischof in "LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed"

tsbischof — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 22:55:08 +0000

https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents

New comment by tsbischof in "Technology holy wars are coordination problems (2020)"

tsbischof — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 07:43:33 +0000

One of the big changes was to make many basic tools into lazy iterators instead of greedy lists (map, filter, range, etc.). I can remember having to teach my fellow scientist/engineer colleagues not to just loop over an index variable when working with certain datasets, but this was a major bit of friction because they were so used to Matlab and other languages where direct indexing is the primary method. While lazy execution is great for many things, it is not something that is necessarily common knowledge among people who use coding as a means to an end.

Additionally, because so many of the core libraries were 32-bit only or Python 2 only, you ended up having to either write your own version of them or just go back to 32-bit Python 2. Numpy in particular (and therefore transitively anything halfway useful for science and engineering) took several years to stabilize and I have many memories of having to dig into things like https://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/ to get unofficial but viable builds going for the Windows machines we used. It was enough of a pain to deal with dependencies that I actually ended up rolling my own ndarray class that was horrendous but just good enough to get the job done.

New comment by tsbischof in "AWS Works Council Germany"

tsbischof — Tue, 29 Aug 2023 19:44:28 +0000

That depends heavily on the organization. Our works council technically approves hires but realistically has little influence on most decisions

New comment by tsbischof in "Calls to investigate tax sites for sharing financial information with Meta"

tsbischof — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 15:33:59 +0000

So collect the data? In Germany it is standard to classify workers based on marital and child status[0]

[0] https://neotax.eu/en/blog/tax-classes-steuerklassen-in-germa...