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Comment by MadnessASAP | Hacker News Reader

So they've possibly discovered a material wlthat may have a property that could be indicative of superconductivity at room temperature? It's a shame I don't have any popcorn handy.

I do however appreciate their dedication to not putting the word superconductor in the title.

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Looks like they have observed what they can only explain as apparent superconductivity, but consistent with the Sagan principle are being rather cautious with how they report it.

You know what, one of the authors wrote pretty much the same elsewhere.

可以这样理解: 人类还没有仪器能测到理论严格意义上的迈斯纳, 所以加possible是出于对自然复杂性的敬畏. (Translation: It can be understood this way: humans do not yet have instruments that can measure Meissner in the strict sense of the theory, so adding possible is out of awe of the complexity of nature.)

Source: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/675576020

Give the cesspit formerly known as Twitter a couple of hours and they'll be breaking out the laser eyes again, buzzword in the paper or not.

AI bros can context switch to superconduction must faster than that.

I know it looks silly but what was wrong with being optimistic about what would be the biggest physical discovery since the transistor? Acting like an expert when you’re not is something that I’d say happens on HN just as often as on Twitter. Learn to let it go

There's difference between raising hope and raising hype. Those Twitter gurus ride on any wave convincing of people of whatever they can just to get more traffic. It's mostly harmless until you find people obsessing over updates and start betting on it.

This - these aren't hopeful people with a layman's understanding cheering on the scientific method, they're hype bros looking to gather gullible followers and shill cryptocurrencies to them based on yet another thing they're utterly clueless about and don't care to inform themselves on.

I love "They-ing" because if it's even lightly questioned someone will jump in to explain they know They, and add even more qualifiers. Ex. if we weren't on HN "tech bros" and "AI hype" would start being invoked.

EDIT: I was wrong! On HN too! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38854412

I don’t think this is true. When I heard of LK-99, I remember talking of my friends about it and we sort of daydreamed about what it could mean for society if true. None of us are on social media anymore (except HN if you count that).

Sometimes you just get excited, or want to be excited. Otherwise it’s back to wake up, work, eat dinner, sleep. When cool stuff seems to be happening, why wouldn’t we talk about it? Even if it ends up being a dud, it’s still something to talk about out.

Those "twitter gurus" were actively trying to recreate the paper, and a lot of those "twitter gurus" are actual founders doing actual hardtech startups with relevant degrees and labs.

You know you can block and mute people on Twitter, right? The actual true grifters of the kind you are talking about are pretty rare in terms of a per user basis (though get get lots of distribution), and most of them are very bad at concealing themselves.

People will bet on literally anything. That's their own problem, not mine.

That's way better than people dunking on lk-99 in the name of "science", quick to judge themselves while criticizing early results as too quick to judge

HN was absolutely choked with the same sort of would-be experts, reading the Wikipedia page for Superconductors and trying to post their way into a position of authoritative knowledge. Certainly there are more on Twitter as a consequence of the larger use base, but those two weeks involved some of the most unhinged hype-posting I've seen in the decade I've been following HN.

'Nerds get excited and furiously try to catch up'? Everyone is acting like reading up on superconductivity and discussing it is this social ill - did I miss something? Did it turn into a ponzi scam?

More like people with relatively low familiarity with a field posting with the confidence of ChatGPT and, like LLM spam, recycling and reposting so much material that adds nothing to the conversation that any actually useful content is buried.

I'm not holding my breath for room temperature semiconductors anymore. I've gotten excited too many times. If they come, great. If they don't, no emotional investment here.

What interested me with this line of research is that it seems like even if they are completely wrong about it being superconductive, it looked like they might be on to some novel electromagnetic effects, which while not as exciting as hover trains or long haul EVs, might mean punctuated improvements in more mundane items.

Well, it's an Arxiv paper. Arxiv is perhaps not the best environment for clickbait headlines.

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