[HN Gopher] Teenager invented a low-cost tool to spot elephant p...
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Teenager invented a low-cost tool to spot elephant poachers
Author : doener
Score : 212 points
Date : 2022-08-29 04:04 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| EvanKnowles wrote:
| I was in the Kruger this weekend, and our guide was lamenting
| that they've already lost over 340 rhino this year, and said
| poachers keep hacking their radios and finding out where the
| rhino are, even when they change code they speak in.
|
| I find the chance of that to be roughly zero though - clearly a
| bunch of the guides have been paid off. This isn't a problem tech
| can solve.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Installing your people as guides > paying off poachers.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Secret shopper and encrypted radios?
|
| If the radios can be trusted, you feed bad data to specific
| people and see when the poachers show up. Seems like there are
| some solutions.
|
| When I was in South Africa, the anti-poaching crews were
| clearly underpaid judging by their cloths, demeanor, and gear
| (old radios, and the ratty shotguns). If the job is so
| important it should be better paid.
| dmje wrote:
| Annnnd my "bitter, cynical, grumpy HN type" radar just bust a cog
| :-)
| mijail wrote:
| Kudos to her. Conservation tech is a challenging and exciting
| test bed for "hackers" because it's a hyper dimensional
| chessboard of constraints and strategies. It's easy to reduce the
| solution to "just do this." From one end, poaching is lucrative
| in areas with massive economic disparity. And from the other,
| climate change and the pressure we put on natural resources is
| unbalancing ecosystems driving human wildlife conflict.
|
| A project I've worked on is Trailguard AI, ran by resolve.ngo,
| the principal is Eric Dinnerstein who is the former chief
| scientist at WWF. I can say they our running a start up in every
| sense of the word but the result is beautiful: a satelite/ gsm
| connected, battery powered AI enabled cryptic trail cam that can
| be used as a swiss army knife from animal censuses, to poacher
| detection, illegal logging truck detection and preventing human
| wildlife content (detect tiger + sound alarm).
|
| Good article on trailguard:
| https://globalconservation.org/news/tech-parks-trailguard-ai...
| abailin wrote:
| Related in world news: France taxman deploys AI spy to spot
| hidden swimming pools
|
| https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220829-france-taxman...
| la-di-da-do wrote:
| Now that is what I call girl power what a girl boss girl girl
| girl! You go, girl!
| vadym909 wrote:
| Won't the poachers just change their speed and turning radius to
| not appear as humans?
|
| I've become a bit skeptical of these stories on kids doing what
| normally experienced professionals do (research, startups). I'd
| understand if a kid accidentally discovered or invented something
| cool that no one else thought of. I wish kids focused on fun and
| learning in school. Some of these stories seem like 'spike'
| projects to help the kids college application standout.
| bena wrote:
| This _is_ the kind of shit I would be doing for fun and
| learning in school.
|
| Kids have the disposable time to dedicate to grind stuff like
| this out. All they really need is the spark of interest, then
| everything else takes care of itself.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| It's a nice project, from start to end. Gives you real insight
| how "real world" ML-backed systems work. Data acquisition,
| feature engineering, model design / tuning, etc.
|
| This kind of system is what you'd expect to see in maybe a
| graduate level ML/DL class, maybe even Bachelors thesis.
|
| Whether or not it actually works for catching poachers isn't all
| that important IMO, even though they're marketing it that way. As
| many have mentioned, for it to really work, you'd probably need a
| small fleet of drones - and more likely, data from satellite
| providers. In my area of work (surveillance / intelligence), we
| do a lot of similar stuff - students like these are awesome to
| work with for summer internships / thesis projects.
| yonaguska wrote:
| It's neat, but the real solution is fixing the incentives for
| poachers in the first place. It's an economic issue at its root
| aaron695 wrote:
| sbf501 wrote:
| Well, if we don't solve the poacher problem, eventually it will
| solve itself: no more rare animals to poach.
| shreyshnaccount wrote:
| I made a very very similar project in year 12 in school. (got
| nationally ranked too). looks like they have taken it a few (very
| important) steps further www.github.com/itsa-mee-mario/guardians-
| of-the-wildlife. (sorry for the cheesy name ad)
| whycombinetor wrote:
| Surely you can discriminate a human from an elephant _by size
| alone_ with a thermal camera, without needing to resort to
| movement patterns.
| remram wrote:
| Probably measuring the size is difficult, unless your camera is
| reporting depth? I don't know.
| whycombinetor wrote:
| If you are flying a drone overhead, you know the altitude and
| can do basic trig to find total distance from sensor angle.
| With even very approximate distances one should be able to
| distinguish a 200lb, 0.4m wide, 0.2m long human from a
| 10,000lb, 1.5m wide, 4m long elephant.
| Avalaxy wrote:
| So it doesn't detect poachers, it detects humans. And it requires
| drones flying non-stop over gigantic masses of land.
|
| Edit: having dabbled in this field myself during my studies, I
| know from research that one of the biggest problems is simply
| corruption among rangers. It doesn't really matter if you can
| spot a poacher if a whole group of rangers will decide to not do
| anything about it (because for them the financial incentive of
| doing nothing can be HUGE). Of course the corruption problem
| stems from very low incomes and poor living conditions in those
| countries. If your monthly income is $100, it's quite tempting to
| accept a $10.000 bribe.
|
| Edit 2: I worked on this: https://www.hackthepoacher.com/. We
| tried it with cell phone detection.
| network2592 wrote:
| A better solution could be hacking the supply side by flooding
| the market with fake ivory indistinguishable from real ivory.
| The price of ivory should go down. There will be less financial
| incentive for the poaching and bribing. Some biologists are
| working on this angle [1].
|
| [1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/faking-
| elephan...
| Maursault wrote:
| This. But also putting a bounty on poachers that exceeds the
| value of ivory, make killing poachers so profitable that for
| every poacher, there are 20 bounty hunters. Also, education.
| Also, counter intelligence (ingrain societies that value
| ivory with rumors that touching ivory causes flaccidity and
| ruins libido, which is highly contagious, etc.)
|
| Also, why don't we just take all the elephants and rhinos
| from them, establish them in the American west? We can deal
| with the ecological issues.
| bombcar wrote:
| > We can deal with the ecological issues.
|
| This is a refrain heard so often (as a wild herd of fifty
| thousand elephants goes trumpeting through downtown Salt
| Lake City).
| Maursault wrote:
| 13,000 years ago, very elephant-like creatures roamed N.
| America.[1] So the ecological issues are not going to be
| a big problem. Besides, elephants stampeding through Salt
| Lake City is not an example of an ecological issue. Call
| Animal Control.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gomphothere
| Verdex wrote:
| "No, no, poaching elephants is actually really safe."
|
| "But, but the bounty? Poacher heads go for ten times what
| ivory goes for."
|
| "That, look, scary stories that the government has to tell
| to make the voters think that they're doing something to
| help those poor defenseless elephants. Scare tactics. Think
| about it, if they really were going to do anything about
| the poachers, then they wouldn't be putting up some bounty
| against poaching. It's an admission that they can't and
| they won't do anything to stop us. Besides, factory has
| been shut down for three weeks and isn't opening any time
| soon. You want to put food on the table or not?"
|
| <LATER>
|
| A rifle shot rings out across the early morning plains. An
| elephant collapses to the ground and breathes its last
| breath.
|
| "Change of plans Fred, we've got video evidence that you
| just poached an elephant. I hear poacher heads go for ten
| times what ivory does."
|
| "You said the bounty was nothing but propaganda!"
|
| "Yeah, good thing there's no bounty on liars."
|
| A second rifle shot rings out across the early morning
| plains. "Now, sure would be a shame if all that ivory goes
| to waste."
| itsyaboi wrote:
| A long-winded example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pe
| rverse_incentive#The_origina...
| patentatt wrote:
| Unfortunately this is accurate, much like the bounties
| put on certain people within Afghanistan where it sure
| seems like it was abused by certain local tribes to take
| out some rival and profit from the US Government in the
| process. In areas where you'd want to put a bounty on
| people, there's bound to be enough corruption and
| misaligned incentives to make it not work the way you
| hoped.
| alistairSH wrote:
| That. Plus...
|
| Poacher Hunter to the paying authority: "Bob was a
| poacher. I didn't shoot him while he walked home from
| work. I promise."
| trasz wrote:
| Your situation is still 50% success, although with
| collateral damage (the single killed elephant).
| Verdex wrote:
| "Oh, we call him the poacher punisher. Poachers killed
| his family, or at least that's the story. He's killed
| hundreds of poachers, maybe even thousands. In fact, he
| once killed an entire village of poachers. Men, women,
| children, dogs, poachers all of them. At least according
| to the poacher punisher. He brought back the ivory he
| said he found on them. It's how he made his first
| million."
|
| A man kills an elephant with a rifle and then shoots the
| rifle with another rifle. He brings in the first rifle
| and gets a reward. Then he sells the ivory and gets a
| second reward. I'm not convinced that this situation is
| any improved (and certainly not a 50% success) if instead
| of this farce he instead tricks someone who wasn't going
| to shoot any elephants into shooting an elephant.
| orangepurple wrote:
| If the US rented a Northrop Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk equipped
| with appropriate imaging systems to these governments the
| poaching game might change. Lesser reliance on corrupt rangers.
| Unfortunately I doubt these things make financial sense in the
| name of conservation
| px43 wrote:
| It sounds to me like the group she's working with is already
| running these drones, and they're currently digging through the
| video manually. That's where she got all the training data to
| make these tools.
|
| Maybe it's not the most effective way to hunt for poachers, but
| it seems to be *one* way that poachers are hunted, and a way
| that has some obvious room for improvement by sprinkling on a
| bit of ML magic.
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| also, drones cause major distress to elephants. it sounds like
| bees to them. its a major reason you are not allowed to fly
| them in chiang mai.
| Someone wrote:
| Its not only the money. Rangers get shot at, even killed, by
| poachers every now and then (Botswana's "shoot to kill" policy
| won't have helped there)
|
| Also, like corruption, poaching also stems from very low
| incomes and poor living conditions in those countries.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| So pay rangers more, with bonus incentives to capture or kill
| poachers, wanted dead or alive like famous wild west posters
| from the 1800s?
| elp wrote:
| This was pretty much what the owner of small game park told me.
| The drones are too high tech and expensive for them to run. He
| said having small teams patrol every night worked better. When
| the teams haven't been able to patrol, for example due to
| flooded roads. He said it only took a couple of weeks before
| the poachers started showing up again.
|
| I always wonder if the better solution isn't to re-legalize
| ivory and rhino horn. All the game farms have room full of the
| stuff. Dumping that onto the market will kill the price, at the
| same time there is suddenly a financial incentive to keep the
| animals safe. Currently its $10k a horn on the black market vs
| a bit of tourism money to incentivize keeping the parks safe.
|
| The saddest part is that horn and tusks grow back so it could
| be a renewable resource if farmed properly. The poachers only
| kill.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Elephant tusks are incisor teeth, nerves and all. They
| continue growing in length during their lifetime, but would
| be insanely painful if cut off, and cannot grow back.
| bombcar wrote:
| Nah, legalize poacher hunting. Most dangerous game and such.
| sobkas wrote:
| > Nah, legalize poacher hunting. Most dangerous game and
| such.
|
| Yeah that would totally not endanger(more than they already
| are) indigenous people living there. After all everyone
| knows how poachers look like.
| bombcar wrote:
| We solve that with poacher-poacher-hunters. And it
| continues forever!
| arcticfox wrote:
| Non-lethal methods only, obviously. It's basically a
| combination between bounty hunting and citizen's arrest
| laws. Not saying it couldn't be abused but it's not
| impossible to imagine it working. You might not even need
| bounties if people saw it as a sport.
|
| It's either that or potentially corrupt park rangers
| doing it - it's not like the existing system works great
| for anyone involved.
| sweetheart wrote:
| The solution to a problem is never the commercialization of
| sentient beings.
| Spivak wrote:
| You'll have a 90 degree uphill battle if you want to
| convince people of that in general -- cows, chickens,
| goats, lab rats, all sorts of insects, bees, all pets,
| harvesting various animals for medicine.
| [deleted]
| sweetheart wrote:
| many uphill battles have been worth fighting before. this
| won't be the last.
| pvaldes wrote:
| > The solution to a problem is never the commercialization
| of sentient beings.
|
| Forbidding agriculture would not solve any of our problems.
|
| Unless you are trying to say that hum "all sentient beings
| are equal, but some are more equal than the other".
| sweetheart wrote:
| agriculture !== animal agriculture
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| It saved the Buffalo
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bison#Livestock
|
| Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo
| buffalo
| Spivak wrote:
| If you care about the species giving humans an incentive
| to raise/protect them is pretty effective. If you care
| about the individual animal this is the worst thing you
| could do.
| spiffytech wrote:
| > Dumping that onto the market will kill the price
|
| I read a story a while back that some folks are dumping
| synthetic ivory onto the market to make prices fall.
| Kranar wrote:
| This ends up making the situation worse. Legalization
| substantially increases demand far beyond what can be
| produced legally and ironically the value actually goes up
| and results in even more of the illegal product being
| produced. Furthermore it now becomes very difficult to
| distinguish between the legal and illegal product,
| providing criminals with an easy cover to launder the
| product.
|
| https://www.nber.org/papers/w22314
|
| Statistics Canada has reported that after the legalization
| of weed, the black market has actually grown quite
| substantially (in absolute terms).
|
| https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/drugs-
| medica...
|
| At any rate, the point is that making things legal or
| available can often paradoxically significantly increase
| demand for the illegal product and in the process make it
| much easier for the black market to operate.
|
| And just to add in some controversy to the discussion, the
| same is true of prostitution. Almost all places that have
| legalized prostitution also have significantly higher rates
| of human trafficking including underage prostitutes.
| beebeepka wrote:
| God bless them. I don't what makes people want ivory in the
| first place. Pure evil
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The problem can be better solved by getting the demand under
| control. China, one of the historic worst offenders, actually
| managed to do so [1], but Japan's legal market [2] still
| entices poachers and smugglers (who supply the black market
| in China [3]).
|
| [1] https://www.worldwildlife.org/press-releases/demand-for-
| elep...
|
| [2] https://asiatimes.com/2022/05/japan-sends-wrong-message-
| on-i...
|
| [3] https://us.eia.org/campaigns/wildlife/elephants/japan-
| ivory/
| jeltz wrote:
| Vietnam is another huge market, especially for rhino horn.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > I always wonder if the better solution isn't to re-legalize
| ivory and rhino horn. All the game farms have room full of
| the stuff. Dumping that onto the market will kill the price,
| at the same time there is suddenly a financial incentive to
| keep the animals safe.
|
| Until that stock runs out and then it is back to square #1.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| It's working for the buffalo. They were endangered until
| someone realized you could sell their meat as an "exotic"
| meat for more than a burger. Now the buffalo are all over
| the place.
|
| To paraphrase CGP Grey it turns out the best evolutionary
| advantage is being useful to humans.
|
| If any of the execs of Panda Express are reading this give
| me a call I got a big idea for your brand.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| But it was a teenage girl who "solved" something you engineers
| couldn't, so take that!
|
| I always found it funny, how journalists manage to take
| something a kid did, without knowing the specifics, and inflate
| the story, just because a kid did it.
|
| Even if it's useless in real world, and the people working on
| that professionally, could already tell you that...
|
| Sometimes it's even a direct scam:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otjvUz7qKXc
| xwdv wrote:
| I'm not surprised someone wrote this article, I'm just
| disappointed it managed to get upvoted so highly on HN. I
| will flag it.
| rvz wrote:
| Exactly. Garbage articles only intended for ad money and
| clickbait for the naive on read as far as the headline and
| it turns out the solution is worse than projected.
|
| Even this article was posted a day late for slow news day.
| remram wrote:
| Sure, break two HN guidelines in one go.
|
| > If a story is _spam or off-topic_ , flag it
|
| > If you flag, please _don 't also comment that you did_
| swayvil wrote:
| To be fair, accusing people of breaking guidelines also
| breaks guidelines. Better to insert your concerns into
| inscrutable flaghole.
| orangepurple wrote:
| The worst one I know of is the free energy kid featured on an
| episode of Elecroboom (YouTube). The parents are clearly
| supporting the kid's delusion which makes it even worse.
| giarc wrote:
| I wouldn't say the story is inflated. She won a few awards at
| the "Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair,
| the world's largest international pre-college STEM
| competition". I assume the judges and the people running that
| are not just some nobodies.
| sieabahlpark wrote:
| throw__away7391 wrote:
| This kind of behavior puts a lot of pressure on kids for the
| amusement of adults as well.
| alt4839483 wrote:
| Take an existing problem ("Track poachers"). Notice that
| elephants walk differently to humans, and that movement
| difference can be used to identify the difference even in
| lower res videos (surely there's simpler ways, like size and
| shape? It's plausible that gait is actually a better way
| though). Take an existing dataset, plug it into your
| favourite machine learning library, and run your model over a
| drone feed somebody else did 99% of the work for.
|
| Handwave away that most of the cost in the drone is going to
| be in getting it decent range, not a decent FLIR camera. Add
| in a 5x bonus to media coverage because you're young, 5x
| bonus because you're a woman in STEM, say something about how
| important skin colour, demographics, and chromosomes are for
| doing some mediocre programming:
|
| > "What I really realized from this is how important it is
| that women, people of color, all sorts of minorities in the
| field of technology are at the forefront of this kind of
| groundbreaking technology."
|
| And you've got some journalists writing about you and not
| something far more interesting and useful, because A. The
| journalists can somewhat understand it, B. You're under the
| age of 20, C. You're a girl in STEM, D. You're a minority,
| and E. It's about good animals being protected from evil
| poachers, giving it a nice simple narrative.
|
| And I'm sure her winning that competition was _totally_ about
| merit and not because they 've got a mandated 50% women
| winning (and she's a minority, extra points!) and probably 5%
| of submissions are by women. Or maybe it's not? Maybe it was
| merit. Either way, implicit and explicit quotas mean that
| it's more likely than not, and my knee-jerk reaction to this
| is one of "she's there because she's a girl" and not "she's
| there because of merit". What fantastic efforts to get rid of
| stereotypes, right?
|
| I'm around her age, I'm tempted to try to send something
| similarly useless to that competition and get $10 000. But
| why bother, when the first, second, and third place will
| inevitably be taken up by girls with useless projects going
| "It was _so_ difficult to get here, all I had was exclusive
| help in the form of courses, programs, special treatment, and
| mentors all along the way and competing against 10% of the
| people for 50% of the spots "
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| It's definitely poor journalism but it's good for encouraging
| this girl to keep on going.
|
| It doesn't cost much and can be helpful for society in 10
| years when she's going to be the next Elizabeth Holmes.
| peterhalburt33 wrote:
| Wait, what? The last thing we want is more Elizabeth Holmes
| types...
| llanowarelves wrote:
| You had me in the first half
| akudha wrote:
| That is what happens when they have to constantly write
| stories for traffic and eyeballs. Your story's life is a few
| hours at best. So why bother being accurate? Being first and
| clickbaity pays the bills, not being accurate.
|
| The whole system needs a reboot. Without good journalism,
| democracies can't survive
| [deleted]
| raman325 wrote:
| Wow, have a little heart why don't you. Sure, this isn't
| going to revolutionize anti-poaching, but it shows two
| things:
|
| 1. Teenagers can build cool things too! We need more kids
| interested in STEM and females are underrepresented, so these
| "puff" pieces are great inspiration for the next kid who
| happens to come across it.
|
| 2. All that was needed for her solution was a cheap FLIR
| camera connected to an iPhone 6, meaning you don't have to be
| rich/VC funded to experiment with hardware solutions.
|
| This is Smithsonian Magazine, not the Wall Street Journal. I
| say bring on more stories like this!
| kzrdude wrote:
| At the same time, I think it's ok if news stories are not
| about only world-changing stuff. It can be about "mundane"
| stories of "this young person did something" too. We can read
| the story and give it space on the page, even if someone else
| is already doing the same thing better (?)
| jasode wrote:
| _> It can be about "mundane" stories of "this young person
| did something" too._
|
| Yes of course but your well-meaning reply is missing the
| argument made by gp: for some topics, the _readers don 't
| have enough background knowledge to know_ that it's a
| mundane story because the journalists are (possibly
| inadvertently) inflating the significance.
|
| E.g. compare 2 different examples:
|
| - _" Teenager builds ramp to help nursing home patients in
| wheelchairs."_ <-- Readers already have enough background
| to know that "ramps" are common solutions to "wheelchair
| mobility" so the significance can easily be categorized as
| "mundane feel-good story". We can easily discount the
| _ramp_ in the title and therefore properly appreciate that
| it 's actually a human-interest story of a teenager doing
| something nice.
|
| - _" Teenager invents tool to spot elephant poachers."_ <--
| Most readers have no existing knowledge of what technology
| is already in use to judge the significance of that type of
| story.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| This was in the article.
|
| > Eikelboom cautions that Puri's model still needs to be
| tested on raw video footage to see how well it can detect
| poachers--the accuracy of Puri's model was tested using
| figures already determined either human or elephant. He
| also says other barriers already exist to using drones in
| parks, such as the money and manpower to keep them
| flying.
|
| They also explain the technology choices and some of the
| other challenges.
|
| Your issue is with the headline.
|
| If all you read is the headline, then fine, let's play
| that game.
|
| > It can be about "mundane" stories of "this young person
| did something" too. "Yes of course"
|
| Okay, that's it. You agree with the previous comment.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > for some topics, the readers don't have enough
| background knowledge to know that it's a mundane story
|
| _Why does it matter?_ The press does context-free puff-
| pieces _all the time_ , even for professionals allegedly
| at the very top of their game (off the top of my head:
| Steve Jobs, Elizabeth Holmes[1], Elon Musk, Jeff Dean,
| and Sanjay Ghemawat to a lesser extent). Typically the
| template is "Genius expert invents X all by himself"
| without providing additional context for people outside
| of tech.
|
| Food for thought: do you suppose journalists are
| exclusively wrong in tech reporting only? Or is this an
| area you have enough context to understand the nuances?
|
| 1. Sometimes the "revolutionary tech" is not just plain
| evolutionary, but fake. But a layperson reading the
| hagiography can't tell the difference
| jasode wrote:
| _> Why does it matter? The press does context-free puff-
| pieces all the time, _
|
| Yes, I'm very aware of the meta-game around "puff pieces"
| which I've explained before:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30881420
|
| It seems your _" Why does it matter?"_ was just a
| rhetorical question as prelude to your comment about puff
| pieces already existing in abundance ... But I'll answer
| it as if you had asked that question earnestly: _It
| matters because readers would like to know how to gauge
| the significance of unfamiliar tech mentioned in the
| article._
|
| So we have 2 interpretations of this thread's article:
|
| (a) this poacher detection tool is a true breakthrough --
| and the inventor also happens to be a teenager; the _tech
| itself is not hype_. The idea is truly a game changer and
| while the inventor 's age is very young, that's a
| footnote to the tech invention.
|
| ... or ...
|
| (b) the tool's tech (machine learning) is not significant
| and may not even work in the real world -- but the
| teenager's attempt at problem solving is showing promise
| of future things to come; let us celebrate this young
| person's effort.
|
| A previous example of the first (a) type of story is this
| one a teen discovering a new classical algorithm
| comparable to a quantum algorithm:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17654220
|
| That wasn't some pure human-interest puff piece about
| teenager Ewin Tang. Instead, a respected computer
| scientist (Scott Aaronson) said it was _legitimate new
| work_ that advanced our understanding of the field.
|
| _> 1. Sometimes the "revolutionary tech" is not just
| plain evolutionary, but fake. But a layperson reading the
| hagiography can't tell the difference_
|
| Right ... and readers don't want to mistakenly interpret
| the story as type (a) when it was actually type (b). The
| gp (Avalaxy) of the subthread tried to give us some extra
| perspective about this story that the journalist did not.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > It matters because readers would like to know how to
| gauge the significance of unfamiliar tech mentioned in
| the article.
|
| I agree with you on principle: and it should happen
| across the board and not just reserved for science fair
| submissions, but the press seems incapable of that, for
| reasons good and bad. For one,evaluating new tech is
| subjective (and difficult), and for another, sone news
| puff pieces are mostly written by PR firms.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| I was impressed by what she researched and developed. Now
| she's going to optimise the flight path given the battery
| constraints.
|
| Good work, more than I achieve for the most part, and
| something to celebrate in someone so young.
| elp wrote:
| This.
|
| The world needs more feel good stories. Also if she's doing
| AI on infrared images at 17 she's probably going to be
| really impressive work later on.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| It depends, the followup is often unimpressive. Many
| people who did really impressive things in their youth
| ended up with quite mundane lives.
|
| I mean it along the lines of "at 17, she is doing AI on
| IR images, at 30 she will be fixing bugs in traffic sign
| detection code for a big car company, with no mention of
| her name except in commit logs".
|
| And it is not a bad thing! We need people to fix bugs in
| traffic sign detection code, and she may have a nice pay,
| in a reputable company, with a good work-life balance. It
| may not be impressive work, but it is work that needs to
| be done.
|
| It may not be a feel good story for the press, but I
| believe living a mundane life certainly feels good to the
| one living it.
| Arisaka1 wrote:
| I'm somewhat confused by statements like these because
| they imply that the reason why we're mostly excited about
| it is not what she achieved but where she could
| potentially achieve many years later. Are these "years
| later" something exclusive to young people? I mean, if
| you're 40 years old doing exactly the same thing, and
| you're not retiring anytime soon it's safe to assume that
| you'll be working until your 50's and maybe beyond.
|
| So then, are we celebrating the potential growth of a
| teenager more than that of the potential growth of a
| middle-aged person, on the grounds of potential, or are
| we celebrating that she managed to achieve this at 17?
|
| I'm trying really hard to see beyond age. I don't care if
| someone is 16 or 36. Both can have the same years of
| experience (say 8-10 years of programming), and yet the
| former sounds more romantic and sellable to headliners
| because it's easier to dream big about achievements
| someone in their 25 will do than someone in their 45.
| Why?
| dylan604 wrote:
| >I'm somewhat confused by statements like these because
| they imply that the reason why we're mostly excited about
| it is not what she achieved but where she could
| potentially achieve many years later.
|
| Did you just describe the stock market?
| [deleted]
| anchochilis wrote:
| Because people who become high-achieving outliers tend to
| distinguish themselves in their adolescence. It's the
| start of a virtuous cycle where talent + hard work leads
| to admission into elite institutions (universities and,
| later, companies) which lead to positive network effects
| which amplify the ongoing application of talent + hard
| work.
|
| It's rare for a previously unremarkable 36-year-old to
| suddenly turn in to Jeff Bezos (for a lot of reasons, not
| least that cognitive power peaks at age 25 so learning
| and adapting to novel situations gets harder with age).
| anchochilis wrote:
| I see I'm getting downvoted: why?
|
| I'm a thoroughly average 33-year-old, for what it's worth
| :) I don't mean to imply that we shouldn't continue
| strive for growth and development as we age, but I
| certainly am not as mentally quick or energetic as I was
| ten years ago. There is very little chance I will
| suddenly transform into jwz or John Carmack or <insert
| name of legendary hacker here>.
|
| On the bright side, I am a better communicator and
| strategic decision-maker, and am more satisfied with my
| life as it is.
| [deleted]
| xiphias2 wrote:
| While it's often true what you write, there are real problems
| with real impact with not enough commercial value that people
| can do to improve the world.
|
| I think it's much more interesting than a guy in yesterdays
| HN home page making a lisp machine that almost nobody uses
| for RISC-V which is missing a lot of more important software
| that needs to be written by somebody.
| OrangeMonkey wrote:
| This one small trick that will make your poachers super-mad!
| swayvil wrote:
| Genius girl engineer shows all the boys what's what. Her
| future is so $&#$# bright.
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| This seems overly cynical. If you detect that someone is
| messing about with the bank door after hours you can't be
| certain that it is a robber, but it is still helpful to know. I
| also doubt all the rangers are corrupt. There is no reason to
| let perfect be the enemy of good here.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| _"I was quite taken aback," the 17-year-old from Chappaqua, New
| York, recalls. "Because I always thought, 'well, poaching is
| illegal, how come it really is still such a big issue?'"_
|
| Life lesson. If an activity can generate income, someone will do
| it. Law notwithstanding.
| msadowski wrote:
| This reminds me of this thread on the Ardupilot forum from
| someone in the field using drones to find poachers:
| https://discuss.ardupilot.org/t/autonomous-anti-poaching-dro... .
|
| The gist of it was that the drones were not that effective at
| spotting poachers (8 cases in two years of operations), and even
| if you spot them they will likely be gone by the time someone can
| arrive there.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| I wonder if poachers quickly learn to alter behavior in presence
| of drone noise...
| scrose wrote:
| I have a rather loud drone(DJI mini 2). From about 70m and up,
| the noise is practically non-existent, even when hovering
| directly overhead.
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| Drones can be very quiet. I saw my police flying playing with
| one and it was a whisper even from 30 feet away.
|
| I was surprised because I thought all drones had that
| annoyingly loud hum.
| what-imright wrote:
| There should be laws against these 'look at my clever wiz kid'
| articles. It's not that far off from beauty pageants and equally
| sick and pretentious. I remember just last week here in Berkeley
| seeing a young teenager playing Beethoven's 9th on an electric
| keyboard, perfectly. He was playing on the street and had all of
| $10 in change in his bowl. The look of misery on his face as his
| fingers effortlessly worked out the melody was astounding. He
| looked like a caged animal, living out his parent's dream in
| captivity. $50 says he blows his brains out by his thirties. This
| is abuse plain and simple.
| klyrs wrote:
| Really? This kid clearly cares about the world and wanted to
| apply herself to a problem. There should be a _law_ against
| rewarding such initiative with publicity? She 's 17. When I was
| that age, I was completely bored to death by what I was
| "learning" in high school and I had one foot out the door.
|
| With regards to that musical kid... I've got resting bitch
| face. When I'm focused on a difficult task, it's way worse; I
| call it "thinking murder face." I'm a musician, and if I'm
| playing a complex piece, I couldn't smile if I tried, even
| though I'm loving every second of what I'm doing.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Anytime there says "there aught to be a law..." there almost
| never should be.
|
| That said, I agree the whiz kid articles are dumb, but not for
| the reasons you listed. More just _"yea, let's see how they do
| when they don't have infinite time and zero responsibilities"_.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Unless killed for meat by indigenous folks who need it I 100%
| support the tracking/hunting/fining/imprisoning/etc of anyone
| that kills an Elephant for its tusks or worse for sport.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Correction: I don't support the hunting of people even if they
| are hunters.
| googlryas wrote:
| What about villagers killing elephants who raid and destroy
| their crops?
| gigatexal wrote:
| I'd say that's ok, too, though that's tougher since humans
| are spreading and clearing ever more acreage of land for
| farming that it's affecting what used to be the habit of many
| animals not just the elephant. There's no clear, easy answer
| here, but surely we can take a hard stance on folks that hunt
| them for sport or the ivory trade.
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