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Comment by yieldcrv | Hacker News Reader

I’m getting tired of these, mostly because I don’t have the fundamental knowledge to follow or synthesize the significance

is there a youtuber or tiktoker I can follow? even the nerdiest tiktokers know how to communicate effectively so that would be useful right now, far more succinctly than what I’ve seen so far

edit: just searching LK99 on tiktok gets it done

example https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8LhJccL/

nothing you couldnt get from a summary anywhere else and these incremental random papers arent easily evaluated or worth your time yet

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If you don't have the fundamental knowledge, perhaps either stop reading the posts (or keeping reading the posts but don't contribute comments if you don't feel like you have the know how to contribute), OR go and get educated by reading up on the fundamental knowledge needed or taking an general extension course in chemistry and physics, etc if you want to participate.

Nobody is expected to know everything. You don't need to announce to the world that you don't know something. In fact, there is an assumption that if you don't voluntarily post any comments, that you don't know enough about the topic to discuss about it (or just don't care about it).

True. It feels like social media has given many this main charactery need to share their opinion on everything, even if they have nothing to contribute.

If you want to be on the forefront of learning, well, that takes just a tiny bit of effort on your part.

I've had success following the rabbit holes of asking questions to ChatGPT (paid, GPT4), which leads to more questions, and so on. It's like following Wikipedia links but I can ask about exact knowledge gaps I have. Eventually some branches of inquiry reach the limits of the model's knowledge and I have to go find an article, but I find having an amateur condensed matter physics tutor in the form of the AI to bounce questions off of speeds things up quite a bit.

Just wait for more comments in these threads. Someone knowledgeable is bound to explain more.

Not sure why this is getting such a negative response… it succinctly identifies a challenge in communicating these developments to curious laypersons. Entrepreneurial types like the denizens of Hacker News love the opportunity of a problem they’re positioned to solve, no?

> Not sure why this is getting such a negative response

We're hackers. Newness is enticing. Complaining that you're "getting tired" of something because it's novel while asking for a TikTok summary is lazy.

As another commenter mentioned, start with Wikipedia [1]. From there one sees apatites (think: hydroxyapetite or flurapetite on your teeth) [2]. Searching Google Scholar yields this paper about lead apatite [3][4].

We also see the Wikipedia article talk about diamagnetism; here is a summary video [5]. And here is a promising paper [6] from the Wikipedia entry on quantum wells [7]. I'm currently stuck here: I don't get quantum wells, and don't see--intuitively--how an apatite (or a misformed one) could produce them.

In summary, asking for help is always welcome. Complaining about your ignorance and lack of motivation, seldom so.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apatite

[3] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1107/S0567740880...

[4] https://sci-hub.st/https://doi.org/10.1107/S0567740880008096

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0amdIcZt5I

[6] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8629077

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_well

I appreciate you trying to help in some way but I didn’t ask anything related to these resources…

Edit: I didn’t read your comment charitably as I should have. The resources are helpful in the broader context and you illustrate that moderate effort can give a layperson some literacy about this.

Still, the root comment contains a perspective worth knowing about. It’s a shame that the commenter is getting dragged for expressing it.

yeah, while having an allergy to the word TikTok misses the point that the appeal is affective communication, something that academics objectively lack. Its about the incentive to communicate succinctly in an engaging way, entire fields and other platforms did not create that incentive and one successfully did. hence, why it is mentioned.

besides that, I appreciate the resources!

I think the problem is that they're on an internet link aggregator complaining they don't understand a topic.

There are means to correct that on the same interface. If he's satisfied that a tikTok video has sated his curiosity, that's fine. But a well-referenced Wikipedia or any number of books or university websites or sciHub skubs will also get you there.

Unless you don't care that much. In which case, why post?

Not every post about a topic should have a handholding first comment. It's fine you don't comprehend the totally of every post, and it serves no one to state the obvious on every post you don't get.

I was exhausted when every fucking post was Haskell and the clear superiority of functional programming, so I just ignored it it read silently.

Even if a conversation seems important, you can simply be silent and absorb information knowing you may want to catch up. The internet functionally contains infinite information about the topic at all levels of explanation.

> Entrepreneurial types like the denizens of Hacker News love the opportunity of a problem they’re positioned to solve, no?

HN denziens also tend to do tech support, and nothing is more triggering than "i tried nothing and am out of ideas"

I'm guessing the negative response was maybe because of the very negative tone.

Somebody submitted what they thought was an interesting link and the comment was dismissive to the point of hostility.

It probably didn't help that the suggestion for a better source of information was TikTok which - while actually having genuinely decent short explainers for all sorts of things - carries with it the stigma of drivel.

Buy a copy of Kittel and read it? His superconductivity chapter is okay enough and only like 50 pages.

I know that's not too helpful, but it's hard to offer much of anything if you don't share what you're struggling with. Or, if you're looking for a Wikipedia-level introduction, I'd suggest... Well, Wikipedia.

The Wikipedia article on LK-99 is not a bad starting point.

I’ve skimmed that as well, its more about the ensuing posts and papers that are equally obtuse and have no update on wikipedia and aren't front page news anywhere

I can’t understand them enough to judge, but is the lack of immediate fanfare from digestible reputable sources an indictment, or am I early? I cant tell where to put energy

They are no more obtuse than your average discussion between a couple of IT people. Welcome to how the rest of the world sees us.

"tiktok gets it done" I'm no physicist but if someone said that about my area of specialization, I'd die a little inside.

Quite.

think about why you need to put energy into this?

do you really care about this or do you just want to win internet points?

there are so many topics in the world, why do you need to put energy into this one?

it's kinda like someone asking which programming language to learn because there are too many of them and all the introduction to programming tutorials are too obtuse and too hard, without a real reason for learning programming in the first place.

like the previous poster said, if you do care about it, the wikipedia article and the footnotes are a good place to start.

well i imagine they would want to put energy into this one for the particular reason that everyone is currently always saying this topic in particular changes basically absolutely everything in the world. but that would be pure speculation on my part.

for me, there are tons of aspects of the world that changes absolutely everything in the world all the time.

medicine, environment, climate effects, stuff that the James Webb Telescope is observing (for example the idea that the universe is way older than we thought), every single moment we are creating or observing something new and suffering from (or benefiting from) the impacts of what we found or created.

If a person wants to go from "I don't know anything about this topic such that a wikipedia article is too confusing to interpret" to "I can understand an arxiv paper and discuss about its significance" they absolutely need to know why they want to do this.

There are a lot of topics in the world, and it's past the time where a DaVinci can master topics from anatomy to physical science to philosophy all in one lifetime. Gotta pick and chose, and knowing why is a big part of picking.

You are just early, the stream of papers are getting posted within hours of their release which is not really enough time to make it to wiki or explainer blogs

I try to post a short summary of why I found a particular article interesting. Not sure it connected this time, but I generally find that helpful when reading someone else’s post from outside my field

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