mNovak

I agree things like the slit experiments are easily explained by classical waves, and thus seem to point to particles being waves; and I see no inherent reason to bring up probability distributions and such to answer that observation.

Where I'm struggling is that classical waves will always spread out spherically, and their energy must do so too. The issue here being that if a photon is a minimal quanta of energy, but is just a classical wave, what prevents it from spreading out and having sub-photon energy? Or if indeed it does, how does that sub-photon quantity get measured? -- if these experiments claim to be emitting a time-series of single photons, classical wave interference won't occur (again, being separated in time).

I was hoping they'd have a discussion of the algorithm itself. Quanta is usually good about making these sorts of things approachable.

In any case, the full paper is here [1] if you don't want to scroll through the Wired article.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.02305

Given that most (all?) of the US already collects property tax, this information is usually public, and (in my experience at least) includes land and property valuations, I'm curious if anyone has attempted a basic estimate of the needed LVT tax to fund some percentage of government spending? Many variables, sure, but I'm talking order of magnitude.

Is there a human-play benchmark (even informally) for this style of interface? Not saying it's necessary or even relevant, I'm just curious to know what programmatic Factorio feels like -- I imagine spatial reasoning around text prompts would be fairly challenging for human players to navigate as well.

A lot of fun! I enjoy the subtle coloring and changing background texture.

It's a bit confusing at first to grasp that one upgrade is applied randomly at the start of the game (I think?). The first few times I played it felt like the rules were changing and I couldn't figure out what contributes to the score multiplier.

Also, when you get multiple upgrades, the text reads something like "You caught 0 coins out of 0 in 0 seconds (+1 upgrade and choice). You missed 0 times (+1 upgrade and choice)." which is a bit confusing.

I think there's a lot of interest in this topic generally, so I hope this continues to develop. I for one pay for ExpanDrive, and am also aware of Mountain Duck in this space.

In my experience, those options are functional for infrequent operations, but not constant daily interaction, in the way you can with Dropbox for instance. Offline caching is of course one major aspect, but also I presume lots of error handling hidden in the background for smooth operation.

Now this is an interesting idea.. a wall clock display showing the closest time-relevant meme..

>> Your signal returns are from the beam or side lobes

You're skipping a step -- where does that beam come from? For simplicity lets think about a scene illuminated uniformly (i.e. from a single element) so that we don't get hung up on the transmit beam. I think we agree you could still sweep a receiving phased array beam across that scene. Lets further assume it's digital beamforming, so you're storing a copy of the signal incident _at every element of the array_. Not a 'beam' yet, just a bunch of individual signals.

>> you get a return from everywhere all at once

Yes! Think about each of those elements of the phased array -- they're also receiving signals from everywhere all at once.

It only becomes localized into a beam when you combine all the elements with specific phase weights. That process of combining element returns to form the beam is mathematically identical to what you do in SAR as well -- combine all your individual 'element' (individual snapshot in space) responses with some phase weights to get the return in one direction. Repeat the math in all directions to form one dimension of the image (second dimension is the radar time-of-flight bit, which is unrelated to the beamforming).

Maybe not you specifically, but I think people don't understand the 'synthetic aperture' part. Specifically, that you can ignore the time between snapshots (because the transmitter and receiver are synchronized) and act like all the snapshots the platform took across the line of flight happened simultaneously. What you're left with is the element responses to a big phased array, and you can 'beamform' using those responses.

Yes, if you can coordinate and hold their position to ~1/10th of the wavelength (gets challenging above a few GHz), and synchronize their transmitters/receivers with ps accuracy (feasible if there's no GPS interference). And somehow you're exchanging the raw signal components amongst all the platforms.

The parabolic distribution is not at all needed in this case, you would just adjust the phase at each unit based on the distribution you have.

It is a thing that's considered, mostly for very low frequencies (1-100MHz) where all the above challenges are vastly simplified, and also large antennas (potentially km) are needed for any kind of directionality.

This site [1] has pretty approachable content generally, though it looks like the SAR page is pretty short.

I find it easiest to understand in the context of a conventional phased array, but that might not help if you don't already know how those work.

[1] https://www.radartutorial.eu/20.airborne/ab07.en.html

I find there's a two step process, first overlapping the images (but which makes the images blurry), then letting my eyes refocus so the middle image is crisp. Only then does 3D or shimmer effect happen. Takes some practice to merge the images while maintaining focus for me.

I recall someone using one of the image generation models for pretty impressive (lossy) compression as well -- I wonder if AI data compression/inflation will be a viable concept in the future; the cost of inference right now is high, but it feels similar to the way cryptographic functions were more expensive before they got universal hardware acceleration.

Would love to see the files or precut sheets released as the ultimate scale model kit. It'd be really awesome to take these files to a laser cutter and make the model out of thin aluminum sheets.

FYI: discussion [1] of this attack from late 2022, notably including lengthy discussion from the developer (hexahedron / lightvector) of KataGo, probably the most widely used super-human Go AI.

Link is mid-thread, because the earlier version of the paper was less interesting than the revision later on.

[1] https://forums.online-go.com/t/potential-rank-inflation-on-o...

I paying < $0.50 a month, and that's primarily driven by S3. For the scraping itself I'm using lambda, with maybe minutes of runtime per day.

"The data collection process involved a daily ritual of manually visiting the Tagesschau website to capture links"

I don't know what to say... I'm amazed they kept this up so long, but this really should never have been the game plan.

I also had some data science hobby projects around covid; I got busy, lost interest after 6 months. But the scrapers keep running in the cloud, in case I get motivated again (anyone need structured data on eBay listings for laptops since 2020?), that's the beauty of automation for these sorts of things.

"an inapt comparison of the prices paid for parts that meet military specifications and designs versus basic commercial items that would not be qualified or approved for use on the C-17"

This is the problem--the government heavily regulates (which the big contractors encourage) all the parts and suppliers until Boeing becomes the sole-source supplier and can charge arbitrary prices. There is a reason for it at times, i.e. to answer does someone die if this part fails or can we just stock a few spares? But obviously many many things being vastly over-specced most of the time.

Besk has existed for a long time in Chicago, which I've heard referred to as "good Malort." It has a brighter, anise-forward flavor which puts it more in line with Italian amari.

The variants are what worry me; it seems to defeat the purpose of a drink that built a reputation on being "unenjoyable" to make it more palatable while using the brand name for cachet.

All that to say, I tried barrel aged Malort -- it mellows down the flavor, so sure it's "better," but again what's the point? There are plenty of better tasting shots out there.

These are great for vintage lab gear too. In college I got an old flammable chemicals cabinet, which we refinished into a liquor cabinet.

This looks really fun, and I'm hopeful for low cost prototyping to come to IC development. But I think 3D printing is the wrong comparison -- the much closer example is PCBs, and while we can DIY PCBs (I did this in college) it's not even necessary as they're just so cheap because of the rise of aggregators and high volume scaling in China.

I have to wonder if there's not more that can be done on this front for low cost IC prototyping. I don't think the fixed infrastructure is necessarily the problem (i.e. building the fab) as there's enough capacity for cheap chips in volume, meaning each additional wafer isn't the cost limiting factor. There are multi-project wafers (like PCB aggregators), but my understanding is that the hard cost limit currently is the NRE of making the mask set, which isn't getting amortized over a sufficient number of devices in a prototype run.

So cheap masks (or fewer masks) would be an area I'd be interested to see development.

I wouldn't overinvest your confidence in these licenses and certifications. A "Professional Engineer" is just a Bachelors level engineer who took one extra test. It's extremely common for MechE and CivE. As far as certifications go it's not quite the same as, say, passing the bar exam or finishing med school.

I went ahead and made a post over at the PG proofreaders site (pgdp.net) to make them aware.

Some more technical content (literature review, but includes the university work this spun out of) if the sales page isn't doing it for you:

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=919...

Diamonds are already certified by GIA, so that you prove their clarity and quality and such (which no untrained observer would be able to differentiate)

My main brokerage (Schwab, and I assume most others) have account aggregation built in, so that's become my de facto 'wealth manager' dashboard.

Now, those external accounts are second-class citizens and don't get portfolio analysis and stuff like that, so there is room for improvement, but the ease of use and cost (free) is hard to beat.

I used to really like Splitwise for group expenses, but they at some point throttled the free accounts to 4 transactions/day, which is painful. Paying a monthly subscription isn't worthwhile if I only use it in bursts a couple times a year, so its back to spreadsheets.

As an antenna engineer myself, I'm always very glad to see tools and open source that make RF/microwave more accessible as a hobby!

That said, it'd be really great if this could simply be hosted/accessed online. The intersection of RF engineer/hobbyist and knowing how to work with Docker is slim (anywhere other than HN), which detracts from the "user friendly interface".

Am I supposed to be able to side-scroll those categories in /explore? Can't find any way to, and the last card is half cut off. I'm intrigued to explore strategies I'd never thought about, but can only see about 3 cards per category.

This is Brave on Windows.

Would also be nice to know in advance what the price/profit model will be (on the site, I see you've answered it here). I would expect a brokerage to be a long term relationship.

Now for extra bonus points, wire in a ESP32 to flip the switch remotely, so you don't have to open the service panel every time (and perhaps help out the neighbors).