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briankirby

27 karma · joined July 1, 2016

https://briankirby.github.io/
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briankirby··on The brain's waste clearing lymphatic system shown in people for first time
Thanks so much for creating and sharing this! Could you point me to any other independent research in this area? Also, as I read related journal articles, I'm trying to understand if the 40Hz sound is binaural (with a 40Hz difference between frequencies in each ear) or a straight 40Hz pulse (same in both ears). It's surprisingly hard for me to get a clear answer. Do you happen to have any experience with this or suggestions for related resources that might contain the answer? Thanks!
briankirby··on Guide to Deep Work
Not quite, in the book it's clear that by "Deep Work" Newport is specifically referring to difficult tasks which create significant value. The book includes several heuristics for identifying this sort of work. It's true that the arrival of electronics has made "Shallow Work" easier to fall into, but by no means would going to work somewhere without a computer or a phone mean you are doing "Deep Work."
briankirby··on The Tragedy of Baltimore
I actually work in College Park, so it's a nightmare of a commute. My wife and I want to stay this far north because both of our families are here and help out a lot with childcare.
briankirby··on The Tragedy of Baltimore
As a fellow Baltimorean, I just wanted to echo this sentiment. I have a one kid, and another on the way, and trying to find a reasonable neighborhood in the city to buy a house in is a nightmare. Really we can decide between Mt. Washington and Roland Park, but as you pointed out, even the high price tag to get into those neighborhoods doesn't help much with high school. I'm really at a loss for what to do, I'll probably try to move over the the county line into Pikesville or Catonsville.
briankirby··on Handbrewing Coffee
I went through a similar search for a cheap homemade espresso and ended up landing on the 3-cup Moka pot. It's not exactly espresso, but I find it's good enough for me, especially if I put it into a cappuccino or something else.
briankirby··on Ask HN: What was the one book that you read and it actually changed your life?
I'm not religious at all and still loved 'The Screwtape Letters'. I recently found myself reminded of TSL while watching 'The Good Place'. It's not of nearly the same depth as TSL but plays with some of the same concepts.
briankirby··on Art technicians: The industry’s dirty secret, or all part of the process?
I actually think it's almost the opposite in my experience as a physicist. Often graduate students are given the first author position, the position which indicates the most credit, even though in many ways the graduate student is closer to a highly skilled technician following the path laid down by their more experienced professor.
briankirby··on Google Engineers Refused to Build Security Tool to Win Military Contracts
I'm confused.

You seem to think everyone on HN agrees with each other.

briankirby··on Poor fitness linked to weaker brain fiber, higher dementia risk
For most people, living biking distance from work is prohibitively expensive.
briankirby··on Zelle users are finding out the hard way there’s no fraud protection
Alternatively, I never started using Venmo because I never trusted a third party to have my banking data. Now I use Zelle because it's backed by my bank, and since basically everyone I know now has it by default from their bank, I have seen pretty high adoption rates with my friends.
briankirby··on iPhone X
What about just printing out a photo and placing it in front of the camera? Does it have some way of understanding depth?
briankirby··on How Many Years of Life Does That House Cost?
"If you can rent and invest, you can also buy and invest"

Not necessarily, the less you put into the downpayment the more you pay in interest, the less the calculation makes sense.

I'm not disagreeing that there are many scenarios, likely including the 6k/mo example, that buying makes sense. What I take issue with, and I imagine other commenters did as well, is the idea that "When you rent, your money is gone. When you buy, you normally get most or all of it back later." This is far too simple, and there are many cases where the two are equivalent or renting comes out on top. It's easy to find such scenarios in the NYT calculator [0], even when you assume your house goes up in value.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-cal...

briankirby··on How Many Years of Life Does That House Cost?
I think the point they were trying to make is that, even if you get a large portion of the sale price back, you don't generally end up with much more than if you had rented. Even if you make more than 50% of your money, as you claim is usually the case, this can be very comparable if not less than renting and investing the down payment in index funds.
briankirby··on List of Quantum Computing Simulators
Personally, I find Nielsen and Chuang (Mike and Ike as it's affectionately referred to in the field) to be a good reference, but not great for learning the topic the first time. It's also expensive. I think that Rieffel and Polak [0] is a little easier to follow, and surprisingly thorough for an introductory book. Note, there is no reason to buy a book though, as John Preskill has his notes online [1], which I often see cited in published manuscripts.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Computing-Introduction-Engine... (Here is a much shorter document by the same authors written explicitly for non experts: https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9809016)

[1] http://www.theory.caltech.edu/people/preskill/ph219/

briankirby··on Chinese satellite is one giant step for the quantum internet
I believe they're referring to this proposal by Gottesman [0]. I will try to explain in layman's terms what is happening: the simplest telescope array you can imagine is just two telescopes separated by what is called the baseline. The telescopes could either just detect light from a star independently and then autocorrelate these signals afterwards, or they could interfere their signals before detection. The latter is called an interferometric telescope array and has a resolution advantage over the former, simpler, solution. The length of the baseline is an important factor in determining the size of the objects you can resolve with such a telescope, and the goal is generally to make it as large as possible. Unfortunately, as the baseline becomes larger the signals from the two telescopes are likely to become distorted or lost before you can interfere them due to the distance you have to send one to reach the other. The Gottesman paper offers one solution to this, which is to use a quantum repeater (essentially quantum teleportation) to send one of the telescope's signals to the other telescope without any loss or degradation, in principle allowing for arbitrarily long baselines in telescopes.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1107.2939

briankirby··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2016)
Location: Baltimore/DC

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes (SF, Denver, Austin, possibly others)

Education: PhD in physics

Technologies: Mathematica, Python

Resume/CV: https://briankirby.github.io/

Email: bkirby57@gmail.com