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Comment by flaburgan | Hacker News Reader

While I find it great that Claude is now helping people to progress on topics they may have not have time or knowledge for before, I found it a bit sad that this is done alone in a bedroom. NASA and ESA do have this kind of program, where they publish data and encourage people to help. There is exactly this for exoplanet searching:

- NASA (with the TESS mission): https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/nora-dot-eisner/planet-h...

- ESA (with the CHEOPS mission): https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/bmerin/planet-hunters-ch... (Very new! Will be announced next week!)

If you are logged in with an account they will even recognise you and add your name to the paper!

So instead of playing alone, join the common effort, this is how science will progress efficiently!

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> NASA and ESA do have this kind of program, where they publish data and encourage people to help.

He helped to sift through published data, found something, then shared it.

I really struggle to find any fault here. He wasn't logged into a portal that hasn't yet been announced? What?

Is it your view that publishing on "the internet" rather than a NASA portal is playing alone and distinct from the common effort?

This is a quote from the Reddit post:

"TESS comes back to this part of the sky in November. I submitted an observing proposal asking it to record this star every 2 minutes while it's there. It was approved. Program #100. "

Yes, which means after doing this research alone instead of collaborating, he went to go see NASA with his findings and they agreed there was something interesting so they will look at it. My point is not that his discovery is small, my point is he could have done it directly in collaboration with NASA, they encourage that.

Spending some time working alone and some time working with others is generally how collaboration works. It seems like he is working with NASA. You're being very nitpicky.

Maybe he is not that gregarious? Not every hobby needs to be social activity.

Yea, I've been having a blast with a RTL-SDR and Claude, telling the LLM to analyze interesting looking signals and try to figure out what they are, and (sometimes) finally successfully decoding them. I'm picking up a bunch of knowledge from the process too, to the point where I'm learning how to do some of the analysis myself.

It's such a low-stakes hobby, and I don't need to care about collaboration or "efficient progress." The local HAM radio group is a bunch of elderly guys who just talk about Trump and their sore backs, not my cup of tea. For some things, you can have plenty of fun alone in your computer room.

Of course not. The point is that you will not do the research as well without the social activity. If you hate social activity, fine, but if you don't, then you should do it.

That really depends. Some research benefits more from solitary study and work. Saturating everything with "collaboration" is not always the best way. It an be an impediment.

(Of course, when we use technology and read books, there is a remote participation in the social as these are cultural and thus social products, but that's not what is meant here.)

Maybe he is not that gregarious? Not every hobby needs to be social activity.

He posted it on Reddit. That's pretty much the definition of both gregariousness and social activity.

Posting on Reddit is sharing on his own terms. GP invites voluntarily relinquishing control over your own hobby work.

I understand that is your point, I don't understand why it matters to you when the collaboration happened? This clearly became a side project for them, one of passion that also seemed to be about exploring their own AI capabilities. Not every collaboration needs to or should start from the ground floor. What would have been the benefit of them collaborating earlier (setting aside it may have diminished their own drive/interest in the project)? The discovery gets recognition earlier? To what end?

Who cares? You seem to be putting the cart before the horse. Collaboration is something you do if there is a reason and a benefit for doing so, not something you do for it's own sake.

And look, he found something interesting working alone. Now he can share it with NASA.

It's nice to be able to freely explore topics.

some of us like to go for solo walks all alone.

It’d be a shame for researchers and society to have to burn through millions of tokens finding new advancements since people “do it for the vine “.

Prickly

Would be cool to re-launch a kind of SETI@Home where locally running models (and OAI/anthropic accounts) could participate with their agents (acting as sub-agents) to do research during the night. I think there is something already about renting local GPU time out, but for profit. Lots of security issues etc with this. But conceptually it would be nice to be able to contribute to space research that way.

Sounds like you've found your next project to spin up... :)

I said this in another thread recently, but I feel like large-scale generation of open-access synthetic data could be a good way to donate unused capacity.

In the late '90 I participated to SETI@home, donating free CPU cycles over nigh on some servers that were running 24x7 and were not utilized at night. Power saving was not a thing, so all that electricity was wasted, I found a use for it.

These days energy is expensive. It may be better to shut down home computers and let organizations use optimized hardware for such type of processing.

> Last month I was going through data from NASA's TESS telescope

Literally the first line of the post.

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