Hacker News Reader

swamp40on Evidence of 'Negative Time' Found in Quantum Physics Experiment

I sure hope they start rolling the recording devices well before any collisions at the particle accelerators - so they can catch any high energy particles zooming off before the collision.

swamp40on Show HN: Put this touch sensor on a robot and learn super precise tasks

I'll bet you could open the grippers fully and recalibrate on power up.

swamp40on Terraforming Mars may be easier than scientists thought

No mention of nuking the poles.

swamp40on Fiber optic drone control beats any RF jammer

I don't see fly-by-fiber getting very popular. The only goal is anti-jamming. But if the drone was fully autonomous, there would be no signals to jam. And the fully autonomous drones are coming fast. Meta's SAM 2 can follow pretty much any object anywhere, and people are beginning to get it running on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin. That's 75% of the work. The other 25% is autopilot and a way to disable it if it flies back over friendly territory. 6 months I'd say, for amateurs starting now. I'm sure some companies already have prototypes working.

swamp40on Meta to pay Texas $1.4B for using facial recognition without users' permission

Is this why Illinois made it illegal too? For a nice big payout?

swamp40on SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos

What is the Illinois law?

Edit: Found lower in thread: biometric privacy laws

swamp40on Astronauts take shelter in Starliner, other spacecraft after satellite breakup

A large disc of lead or steel. With thrusters to position properly. Or multiple discs that spread out like flower petals.

swamp40on A Revolution in Biology?

He used human tracheal cells, not lung cells.

"Because they are one of the few tissues in the body that have motile cilia."[0]

So they can move around.

[0] https://twitter.com/drmichaellevin/status/173042805284737055...

swamp40on Mars rover mission will use pioneering nuclear power source

ESA finally using nuclear power? Hallelujah. They actually learned from the mistake of Rosetta's Philae landing in the shade on Comet 67P, where its solar panels couldn't produce any power and it died humiliatingly.

swamp40on Atomic nucleus excited with laser: A breakthrough after decades

> thorium crystal clock

Take note, science fiction writers.

swamp40on Generative A.I. arrives in the gene editing world of CRISPR

Not a big fan? It could be provably private. You could have a kit with a random username/password. It could be done. People just have a bad taste from 23andMe.

swamp40on Generative A.I. arrives in the gene editing world of CRISPR

We are still early. Eventually you'll be able to change your race, gender, add reptile eyes, regrow limbs etc. Has to start somewhere. Need more data.

swamp40on Generative A.I. arrives in the gene editing world of CRISPR

Imagine an AI learning from photos/videos of a person and their DNA sequence? And also a list of diseases, health records, etc. Then asking it for predictions while giving it feedback afterwards so it can tune itself.

You could even guarantee privacy. That would be some really useful data.

swamp40on Generative A.I. arrives in the gene editing world of CRISPR

Well hopefully it's trained on genetic DNA sequences and not Reddit threads. If so, it should do pretty well predicting the next sequence given previous sequences. There are probably all sorts of undiscovered patterns.

swamp40on $10M in Gold Disguised as Machine Parts Seized from Cargo Plane

Neither X-ray nor x-ray fluorescence (XRF) is going to be able to scan large objects properly for gold from a distance. XRF machines only show the surface or slightly below the surface. If you put gold inside a lead pipe - no chance.

If there was ever a method to reliably detect gold from a distance without costing millions of dollars, it would start a new gold rush.

So, this was either discovered by a very careful inspection or more likely a tip-off.

swamp40on Reverse engineering a car key fob signal

He decoded everything, but he didn't actually open a car door. He still has to defeat the rolling code. It's not like you can add 1 to it and resend it. From the outside world, the next rolling code should appear random.

swamp40on Webb and Hubble confirm Universe's expansion rate

I cannot for the life of me understand how you look at the cosmic background radiation - which appears equally in every direction you look, for as far away as you can see - and say this is evidence of a "big bang", originating from a single spot at a single point in time. And the universe just "expanded faster than light" to cover everywhere with the same consistent drab layer of cosmic background radiation.

It seems like a child's fairy tale to me.

swamp40on Ultra Librarian joins Flux to take the hard out of hardware

It's funny, Altium was the underdog for years. Only as they continually improved did they slowly gain market share.

The tools need to work consistently, just like the tools of a carpenter. If his hammer head keeps falling off, it's not very helpful even if it was free.

My point was that it is really difficult to make sch and pcb design easy for the end user. There are already companies that have climbed that mountain. AI is a nice differentiator, but in my opinion a startup would be better focused by working with existing tools instead of reinventing them (poorly).

Obviously startups are free to do as they wish.

swamp40on Ultra Librarian joins Flux to take the hard out of hardware

That looks cool.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-Q0XVpfW3Y

swamp40on Ultra Librarian joins Flux to take the hard out of hardware

I don't see how it's possible to beat companies like Altium that have been continually improving the sch and pcb design experience for the last 30 years.

The AI is a cool idea. Maybe as an add-on? An import? A library? Collaboration? IDK, but details like via tenting properties on layer 3 are best left to the experts.

swamp40on Ultra Librarian joins Flux to take the hard out of hardware

Digikey has made Ultra Librarian famous. I wouldn't be surprised if they were connected somehow. About 80% of Digikey components have models. About 80% of those are Ultra Librarian models. About 95% of the models are correct, which is a lot better than a few years ago.

swamp40on Satoshi – Sirius emails 2009-2011

Hah, HN shrunk it down to one space.

swamp40on Satoshi – Sirius emails 2009-2011

Two spaces after a period just means you learned on a typewriter. I still do it.

swamp40on Stable Diffusion 3

Jensen was just talking about a new kind of data center: AI-generation factories.

swamp40on Sora: Creating video from text

It's been trained on videos exclusively. Then GPT-4 interprets your prompt for it.

swamp40on Chemists tie a trefoil knot using only 54 atoms

They have a bond that cannot be broken.

swamp40on Another Roman dodecahedron has been unearthed in England

If they are important, they should appear in drawings, paintings, carvings, statues, etc.

Someone should really be searching in these areas.

swamp40on Ask HN: Small-batch builds of smaller phyiscal objects

https://www.pcbway.com/rapid-prototyping/manufacture/

swamp40on How Gyms Make Money (2015)

"The founder of Colman’s Mustard used to claim that his fortune was based on the bit of mustard that everyone left behind on their plate"

Wow.