I feel like the primary use case for such a technology is manipulating and profiling people over video chat, maybe even autonomously. Hiring managers, HR, landlords, and police are obvious customers.

The response I anticipate will be "But this will help doctors over telehealth and stuff!" - Please see https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted

▲ nearbuy 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This tech (detecting pulse from regular video) has been around almost 20 years now, and this doesn't seemed to have happened yet.

You see this type of thing in spy movies, but I'm not sure it's that useful in real life. You're basically taking one piece of data a polygraph uses, but without the most important component (skin conductance). Polygraph accuracy isn't that great to begin with. You can profile and manipulate people more effectively based on their reactions and behaviour, and their pulse will be much harder to interpret.

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ranger_danger 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't think this tech has actually been used in practice for that long, if at all. It was only first demonstrated in 2012 at SIGGRAPH.

Can you cite any commercially available uses of such tech?

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nearbuy 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't know any commercial uses of such tech today. I'm not saying they don't exist. I just don't know of them.

I had said I don't think it's very useful for "manipulating and profiling people over video chat", so I wouldn't really expect there to be a commercial product for that. Probably it's used in fitness or heart rate monitoring apps for people that don't have a fitness tracker device and prefer not to manually count their pulse.

Here is the tech demonstrated in 2007: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17074525/

The core algorithm is really simple. You find a patch of skin. Take the average color of the pixels in that patch. The color will become more reddish each pulse. Do an FFT and take the strongest peak in the plausible heart rate range. You could prototype this in a few hundred lines of python.

If this were useful for police or hiring managers, someone could have use the tech to make an app for them within the past 19 years.

Of course, companies have a history of trying to market a lot of BS metrics (e.g. graphology, MBTI) to hiring managers, so I wouldn't be that surprised to see a company claim they can predict employee success using pulse. Whether it works is another story.

	▲	ddalex 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> You could prototype this in a few hundred lines of python. You mean Claude can one-shot this.

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swiftcoder 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't it's ever been practical to ship in a product? You need ~20 seconds of data to stabilise the reading, and any large motion ruins it - even though Microsoft Research demonstrated a Kinect could detect heartrate in a lab setting, it wasn't viable to ship in a fitness game.

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numpad0 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

(2008)

1: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2717852/

▲ metalcrow 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Can you explain how https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted applies to the potential response you described? I don't get it.

▲ godelski 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Don't get distracted, sit down and read it in full.

Don't get distracted, think about what he wrote.

If you still don't get it, take a step back. Think. Process. Then take a break and read it again tomorrow.

Slow down. Don't get distracted. You don't need to respond so fast. Take your time. There is no rush. There is no shortcut. Read it in full and you'll understand this comment says much more.

▲ _Microft 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Here‘s also an advice: if you want someone to listen, try not to come across like you just did.

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godelski an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Your sibling said something similar, my response is identical

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47294347

	▲	_Microft an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, I read that but your comment still sounds like it does. You're doing yourself no service.

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peyton 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

We’re just BSing on the internet. No need to tone police.

	▲	_Microft 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That internet is elsewhere.

▲ collingreen 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This feels overly patronizing

▲ godelski 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Probably because I repeated "don't get distracted". But if you read the article then I think it'll take on a different context, as I'm mimicking the author, including their short paragraph style.

▲ user2722 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I get really annoyed at those articles which advocate the developer to sacrifice themselves towards a better future.

Companies externalize costs. I refuse to be the one, as an individual, with the burden of fixing society ills to my own detriment.

Tell me to get into politics, join an association, whatever. Now, as an individual, lose money for morals? No thank you. I may, and probably will, do it -- but don't expect I do it. I have no business, in a society with less and less public services, to harm myself and my family for refusing to do well paying jobs.

I will externalise those costs as much as possible. I will bring awareness. I will write letters. But don't ask me to leave a well paying job -- that's someone else job to fix.

	▲	godelski an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		`> as an individual` But that's the problem. Your logic applies to everyone in an organization (a business, a family, a country, and so on). The organizations actions are not the result of any single actors decisions, even if weight isn't equal. The decisions of an organization are made of the decisions of the collective. The agglomeration of them. And that's why everyone's decisions matter. Because you don't know when your actions have more weight than when they have less. We're all in this together. One way or another, your actions affect others. Your actions aren't in isolation. Conversely this is true for others, and I suspect you would rather others treat you well, right? So which feedback loop do you want you contribute to? That's the only question there is
	▲	_Microft an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		´"That's not my department", says Wernher von Braun.´

▲ croes 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They will weaponize it.