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alphydanon Sharper MRI scans may be on horizon thanks to new physics-based model

Funnily enough there's a different Martin (Martin Plenio) pushing the boundaries of MRI resolution using quantum effects (molecular hyperpolarization).

https://www.uni-ulm.de/nawi/institut-fuer-quantenoptik/ag-pr...

For a more technical intro, see https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.14521

alphydanon John Jumper: AI is revolutionizing scientific discovery [video]

Not to worry. With the millions unemployed by AGI, you can get hundreds of thousands of unskilled "hands" for your IA. Even with reasonable failure rates you will get a few hundred experimenters past the 40 steps.

Not sure if I should finish with /s or /fear or /uncertainty

alphydanon A qualitative analysis of pig-butchering scams

On the other hand, many companies outsource their AML/KYC as it's a cost center. And your passport, face, bills, address is stored in a server with dubious encryption, handled by poorly paid service reps.

You can google the many data breaches of such data. Great for scams.

alphydanon ADHD drug treatment and risk of negative events and outcomes

> People with ADHD are clearly able focus when the subject is interesting enough to them

"interesting enough" is not a sufficient condition. You may be super interested, very motivated, and yet completely unable to start. That is one of the most frustrating parts of ADHD to me. When and how hyperfocus kicks in seems to be mostly outside of your control.

alphydanon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://alvarofeito.com/

A few articles about physics, finance and software with some poetry sprinkled in.

alphydanon Double Descent in Human Learning

An alternative explanation is that your google-fu is not as good as openai's crawlers or the WebText corpus (which can go a lot deeper than any of your searches).

alphydanon Ask HN: Best way to “donate” dev hours to charity?

A relative of mine and her friends run an NGO who could use some scripting/data science skills. They audit how the government spends their euros in healthcare, keeping them in check when corruption rears its head. (contact in profile)

alphydanon Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?

> Look the word up, it's essentially an umbrella term that pretty much describes anything that can be considered negative

I suggest you look up the difference between the common sense of the word narcissism and the psychiatric diagnosis (which has a more rigorous and specific definition).

alphydanon Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?

The better question to ask yourself (you the white guy), is would you join a group [insert som hobby like hiking] composed 100% of Cholitas. If yes, are you sure? if not, why not?

*Not singling out Cholitas, but it's a group that may feel "other" to you.

alphydanon Building an interpreter for my programming language with ChatGPT

I hear you. Developers these days. They wear the crutches and exoskeletons of interpreted languages. Real senior devs. only write in assembly. /s

Why is one abstraction more "true", "less creative" or more "strong muscle" than another?

alphydanon People Who Apply for Jobs by Showing Up

When applying for PhDs in the UK from elsewhere in the EU it was hard to get any response to the applications. So I booked a cheap flight to London and contacted the head professors of the departments I was interested in:

- Hey, I happen to be in town in two weeks. Can I give a talk at your group and present a paper I'm working on?

I believe it made all the difference, and got me through the door (with a lesser CV).

alphydanon What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists (2016)

Hi @Dig1t, PhD in quantum physics here. I think it's important to add some nuance here.

1. The crackpots are trying to "disrupt" or "overhaul" the very foundations of Physics. Finding something beyond general relativity or beyond quantum field theory is unlikely without high brain power combined with a minimum of 10 years of full time study. There's no way around it. It's like wanting to be an opera composer with a few months of guitar lessons.

2. This does not mean that there aren't thousands of fun, relevant and impactful physics problems out there. In all areas of physics. There are thousands of small questions that puzzle the best physicists and which they don't have time for, or haven't gotten the inspiration for, etc. Many of them can be tackled without understanding the whole field. It's not about laying new foundations which need to agree with decades and decades of data and theory. It's about using the tools to push the frontier.

If (2) sound interesting, keep going. If you contact a physicist and say:

- I know this and that math (done all problems in this and that textbook) - I'm interested in your field - Are there any accessible open problems that my math could potentially crack open?

Most physicists will likely point you towards interesting problems.

alphydanon Powering the Lunar Base

for those interested, this Austin startup is hiring and building potential lunar bases: https://www.iconbuild.com/technology/space

alphydanon Video Games Are the Future of Education

>> Teachers don't buy that,

We do. See the success of teacherspayteachers.com or tes.com. As a teacher I have spent hundreds of dollars of my own money to buy resources. Simply because I don't have the time for the admin to claim the expense.

The problem is that most resources are bad, if not terrible. The ones that are good are not adapted to what you need, not customisable, etc. You may have come up with a great resource but it has to tick a lot of boxes. Not because the teachers don't love real learning ... but because our hands are tied.

We have this huge volume of content to cover in a limited amount of time and standardised tests await. If your resource doesn't use the same notation, terminology, depth ... some students may be more confused than helped (of course the very smart ones will make deep connections ... but you have to teach for everybody). It's not an easy problem to solve but more time / money for good teachers is the obvious place to start.

alphydanon Hyperdrive v10 – a peer-to-peer filesystem

Could this be used to create a kbfs (keybase file system) competitor?

alphydanon Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

> it would disallow science to make true claims

Isn't that exactly how science work? It does not make true claims. It produces statements with disclaimers. If this and this then Y is true, as long as we don't observe Y.

You cannot use the scientific method to definitely say: "X is true".

alphydanon Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

try reading Brian Cox's "Why Does E=mc2? (And Why Should We Care?)". To understand this you will need at least 10 or 20 pages to set the stage before you can start to grasp special relativity.

alphydanon New test of the gravitational 1/r2 law at separations down to 52μm

Start by measuring it over a few cm. Their setup is "the same" setup Cavendish used in the 18th century (a torsion balance). Read about it here: http://www.michaelbeeson.com/interests/GreatMoments/Cavendis... or watch this beautiful video explaining the idea: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1NTp_zR8Gl7VTJ2aU55cWQzd2s...

That will give you a flavour of the difficulty involved.

Below those sizes, electrical forces start making your experiment very difficult (electrostatic, van de Waals), and any vibration will pollute your data. This is where the "can't do it at home" starts to read its head (something to compensate the vibration of buses driving nearby, a lab with no static electricity or magnetic fields anywhere, etc, etc)

Beyond ... the Casimir effect places a limit to the lengths you can reach.

alphydanon Anonymous shell companies buying American real estate

in the age of deep learning, streetview and daily satellite images it should be possible to determine automatically. Of course such an operation opens the door to all sorts of surveillance.

alphydanon Ask HN: What are some examples of well-designed personal sites?

html only https://alvarofeito.com/

alphydanon Study Finds Wind Speeds Are Increasing, Which Could Boost Wind Energy

it's not odd if you think about what that law is saying. The wind turbine extracts kinetic energy from the wind. If it could extract 100% of the kinetic energy, then the air would simply stop. So incoming air would "pile-up" after the turbine (since it has v=0).

Since that is impossible, the air must have some speed after crossing the turbine to make space for the incoming air. The details of that law are simply, how much can you slow it down?

alphydanon Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

It is hard to make a definitive statement either way. For example:

> Analysts estimate that underground economic transactions account for one-third (33%!) of the total economy in developing countries and slightly more than 10% of the total economy in developed countries. [0]

On the Bitcoin blockchain it may be around 19% (approximately USD $380bn in yearly transactions on Bitcoin [1], $72bn of which may be illegal [2])

So it's hard to say which "monetary system" is doing better in that regard. Of course, I would argue that cryptocurrencies are still in the experimental phase, trying to figure out where they are going and how.

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets-economy/062216... [1] https://www.blockchain.com/charts/estimated-transaction-volu... [2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3102645

alphydanon Ask HN: I need ideas to impress fifth graders with technology

clearly he was a secret agent. Well played.

alphydanon US cell carriers are selling access to real-time phone location data

Sorry. In your years of volunteering with the homeless you rubbed shoulders with the wrong people. Our data says you are Islamofilic. Please present yourself at the interrogation booth March 1st 2025. That's why.

alphydanon Gödel and the unreality of time

There are some cool "practical" consequences like building time machines. But you need some serious civil engineering equipment: First take a mass the size of a star. Squeeze it into a thin really really long cylinder, make it rotate very fast ... and boom! You can travel back to the day you created it.

[0] http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1976PhDT........61T [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipler_cylinder

alphydanon The world split into 7 equal areas of population

Thank you for the clarification.

alphydanon The world split into 7 equal areas of population

for us colourblinds, North America, South America, Australia and Greenland are one group. But I assume they are not.

alphydanon The Case Against Computers in K-13 Math Education (1996)

teacher here. Most smartboards are rubbish. The calibration fails constantly, it's really hard to draw on it ... and most "ready made" lessons for smartboards are usually boring. So I'm afraid it's a projector for me.

alphydanon [dead]

beware. the alleged BTC and ETH giveway in the twitter thread is a scam (from @kimBdotcom instead of @kimdotcom)

alphydanon Is there a fix for impostor syndrome?

I think it's hard to imagine how smart some people can be. Einstein would hang out with people a lot more talented than him in mathematics (Poincare, Von Neumann, Goedel) ... so it's easy to see how he would be humbled.

During my PhD, I thought I was the dumbest one in the group. Some of the mathematical feats of my colleagues would take me weeks to process. But they would grok it in minutes. Eventually you have to take a holistic view: There are the things you are capable of, there are things you might be able to do but are not interested in (For me, spending 8h/day reading theorem, lema, proof statements), things you will never achieve, ... and combinations of skills that only you have and those people don't. Your path to satisfaction and happiness is often not becoming those "expert" people. But it's still great to be challenged and stimulated by them.