HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

ks1723

75 karma · joined July 25, 2016

submissionscomments
ks1723··on The art of defusing a second world war bomb
Some statistics on this for the German state of North-Rhine Westphalia (unfortunately only In German):

https://www.im.nrw/system/files/media/document/file/jahresst...

In 2024, 182 bombs with 50kg or more were removed, 12 of which were detonated on-site.

ks1723··on Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]
I must miss some important context here. What exactly was the purpose of his initial email to OpenAI in the first place?

Telling OpenAI that Anthropic has apparently solved an important problem but most likely that refers to him and he is using OpenAI models (not Anthropic's)?

And he wants to clarify that with OpenAI in advance? And get a pardon for Anthropic's likely but false press statements?

I dont get it.

[edited] needless to say, the behavior of the OpenAI employee is really despicable

ks1723··on Suica, Japan's First IC Transit Card
I also did prefer my plastic Pasmo (essentially the same as suica) card until I learned during my last trip, that it can only be recharged with cash :-/
ks1723··on Delta flight hit by firework while landing at Midway Airport on Fourth of July
This is just BS. I had and saw many public discussion also on German Marktätze on this topic, some quite heated. Nobody was arrested or removed from their job or otherwise sanctioned. But of course people were disagreeing. The right to free speech is not the right to freedom from contradiction!
ks1723··on US's big bet on quantum computing may not be legal
This is just not true. There has been tremendous progress in the field. Starting with google’s experiment in 2019 on showing quantum advantage - admittedly on a useless problem, but quantum advantage nevertheless, to fault tolerant encodings by the Harvard group to recent demonstrations of a road toward advantage in generative models by goggle, to name a few. It’s still far away from running Shor’s algorithm to factor relevant numbers and break RSA and the like, but even there dramatic progress is being made, see, e.g., https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9665
ks1723··on Trump says US will blockade Strait of Hormuz
> Unfortunately, the United States yet again has to bail out the rest of the world.

You mean like the one last time where they fought the war on terrorism in Afghanistan for the rest of the world and where it took them 20 years to replace the Taliban with … ehm … the Taliban?

ks1723··on Philosoph Jürgen Habermas Gestorben
This is utter nonsense. I have seen and read many reports and articles about the suffering in Gaza and the West Bank in the mainstream media! And you won’t loose your job when expressing solidarity.
ks1723··on Visualizing the most common unisex names in the US
Similarly, “Andrea” is male in Italian but female in German.
ks1723··on Every satellite orbiting earth and who owns them (2023)
But apart from all the other stuff you mention, you’re missing an important point: these things move. And unless all objects are synchronized (which they are not) they occupy a whole orbit, not only their actual volume. If two orbits intersect, the objects occupying those will eventually collide.

Therefore, they occupy much more volume.

ks1723··on Laminar Flow Airfoil
What really surprised me when I heard about it was that even after all those decades of research and development, there was still room to develop novel laminar flow wings and fuselage to be used in a business jet[1] in the early 2000s.

[1] https://global.honda/en/products/HondaJet/innovation/innovat...

https://www.hondajet.com/-/media/HondaJet/Documents/Technica...

ks1723··on A Century of Quantum Mechanics
One of the major problems with dark matter and dark energy is, that the standard model has been experimentally confirmed to such high precision. All possible extensions proposed so far which tried to explain dark matter /dark energy have been basically falsified by the experiments.

The standard model is so descriptive and accurate, there is just no room for extensions which predict new physics but are still consistent with existing data.

ks1723··on Quantum Physics Is on the Wrong Track, Says Breakthrough Prize Winner
This is formalized in the Kochen–Specker theorem [1]. Quantum mechanics is shown to incompatible with the following three assumptions being true simultaneously: (1) locality, (2) non-contextually (independent of the context of the experiments (3) realism.

AFAIK, at least one assumption needs to go.

There is a nice paper by N. David Mermin illustrating the incompatibility [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kochen%E2%80%93Specker_theor...

[2] https://www.physics.wisc.edu/courses/home/spring2020/407/exp...

ks1723··on Scientific conferences are leaving the US amid border fears
What I (as a non-US citizen living outside the US) never understood about the US political system is

1. Apparently none sees the (to me obvious) downsides of a two-party system where there is only black and white with cold-war logic of being either with us of against us, no grey zones and willingness for compromise.

and

2. monetary interests are so close to the political system by construction: candidates need to raise a lot of money during their campaigns which they get from companies, private persons and which is tied to their person. How can you not assume that all those people who get into office (senator, president, even judges as I learned recently) with money they got from someone is not in a conflict of interest right from the start? To me it seems there cannot be any independence.

ks1723··on Why does Switzerland have so many bunkers?
They are also common in France and Germany:

These shutters serve as insulation in locations prone to harsh weather conditions, safeguarding windows from hail damage and designed to endure strong winds.

From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roller_shutter

ks1723··on An interview question that will protect you from North Korean fake workers
To get some quick insights on North Korea, Andrei Lankov talks about it in this podcast: https://podcast.silverado.org/episodes/why-north-korea-is-pl...
ks1723··on DeepMind program finds diamonds in Minecraft without being taught
I my view, the 'exactly' is crucial here. They do implicitly tell the model what to do by encoding it in the reward function:

In Minecraft, the team used a protocol that gave Dreamer a ‘plus one’ reward every time it completed one of 12 progressive steps involved in diamond collection — including creating planks and a furnace, mining iron and forging an iron pickaxe.

This is also why I think the title of the article is slightly misleading.

ks1723··on What Bikini Atoll Looks Like Today (2017)
From the second wiki article:

“… the soil and the lagoon water surrounding the structure now contain a higher level of radioactivity than the debris of the dome itself, so even in the event of a total collapse, the radiation dose delivered to the local resident population or marine environment should not change significantly.”

This is just insane.

ks1723··on US pauses all federal aid and grants
You sure know the concept of incubation time. Barring infected persons from entering if they have no symptoms is not possible. And quarantining every single person who enters is also not possible.
ks1723··on US pauses all Federal aid and grants
Big “if”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States_(2024...
ks1723··on Did Elon Musk Appear to Sieg Heil at Trump Inauguration?
100% this!
ks1723··on The Illustrated Guide to a PhD
This is the case not only in the Nordic countries, but also across Europe like Germany, Netherlands, Italy, UK and probably others.
ks1723··on Trump wins presidency for second time
In this snippet I hear no „No“ to the disinfectant, he is just suggesting it an seems to go on: https://youtu.be/zicGxU5MfwE?feature=shared
ks1723··on How Israel’s bulky pager fooled Hezbollah
It seems the Middle East has been terrorizing itself a lot as well:

https://www.fondapol.org/en/study/islamist-terrorist-attacks...

ks1723··on Biggest ever seen black hole jets; blasting plasma well beyond their own galaxy
Since there are conserved quantities like energy and angular momentum it is impossible that everything just collapses. If something collapses, there is usually a large amount of matter which does not collapse to carry away the energy and momentum of the collapsing stuff.
ks1723··on Hardy bacteria found living inside microwaves
Quote from one of the authors:

“A microwave is not a pure, pristine place,” Porcar says. It’s also not a pathogenic reservoir to be feared, he says. But he does recommend cleaning your kitchen microwave often — just as often as you would scrub your kitchen surfaces to eliminate potential bacteria. [1]

So I would not worry too much.

[1] from here: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02553-9

[edit: added source link]

ks1723··on CrowdStrike's impact on aviation
I found it quite interesting, that crowdstrike actually exclude a bunch of services explicitly. They also basically say, don’t use, if it needs to be reliable. I don’t know if this is standard for software, but for me this was quite surprising.

From crowdstrike terms and services [1]: […] THERE IS NO WARRANTY THAT THE OFFERINGS OR CROWDSTRIKE TOOLS WILL BE ERROR FREE, OR THAT THEY WILL OPERATE WITHOUT INTERRUPTION OR WILL FULFILL ANY OF CUSTOMER’S PARTICULAR PURPOSES OR NEEDS. THE OFFERINGS AND CROWDSTRIKE TOOLS ARE NOT FAULT-TOLERANT AND ARE NOT DESIGNED OR INTENDED FOR USE IN ANY HAZARDOUS ENVIRONMENT REQUIRING FAIL-SAFE PERFORMANCE OR OPERATION. NEITHER THE OFFERINGS NOR CROWDSTRIKE TOOLS ARE FOR USE IN THE OPERATION OF AIRCRAFT NAVIGATION, NUCLEAR FACILITIES, COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, WEAPONS SYSTEMS, DIRECT OR INDIRECT LIFE-SUPPORT SYSTEMS, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL, OR ANY APPLICATION OR INSTALLATION WHERE FAILURE COULD RESULT IN DEATH, SEVERE PHYSICAL INJURY, OR PROPERTY DAMAGE. Customer agrees that it is Customer’s responsibility to ensure safe use of an Offering and the CrowdStrike Tools in such applications and installations. CROWDSTRIKE DOES NOT WARRANT ANY THIRD PARTY PRODUCTS OR SERVICES.

[1] section 8.6 of https://www.crowdstrike.com/terms-conditions/

ks1723··on US has the highest rate of maternal deaths among rich nations. Norway has zero
In the same direction: https://ourworldindata.org/rise-us-maternal-mortality-rates-...
ks1723··on Rise in reported US maternal mortality rates largely due to measurement change
duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40340944
ks1723··on Rise in reported US maternal mortality rates largely due to measurement change
This is once more an example where looking at the details of a statistic can alter the first impression quite a bit.
ks1723··on Boom announces successful flight of XB-1 demonstrator aircraft
I would not disagree that you can do it, but I am skeptical that you can do it in 5 years.

Honda did develop their HF118 turbofan engine apparently from scratch, but it took about 8 years [1]. And for the actual commercialization they teamed up with GE and then it took another 10 years until certification of the successor HF120 [2].

[1] scroll down on https://global.honda/en/tech/eVTOL_gas_turbine_hybrid_system...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_Honda_HF120

Page 1 of 2Next →