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Comment by knlje | Hacker News Reader

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. "

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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.

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

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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