Hacker News: aerophilic

Bowling for Nobels

aerophilic — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 14:03:27 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/30/science/math-strogatz-calculus-bowling.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44423415

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by aerophilic in "Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship"

aerophilic — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 20:25:44 +0000

There is a neat solve for the thermal problem that York Space systems has been advocating (based on Russian tech)… put everything in an enclosure.

https://www.yorkspacesystems.com/

Short version: make a giant pressure vessel and keep things at 1 atm. Circulate air like you would do on earth. Yes, there is still plenty of excess heat you need to radiate, but dramatically simplifies things.

New comment by aerophilic in "I-Con: A Unifying Framework for Representation Learning"

aerophilic — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 16:11:52 +0000

This seems to be a way to identify and create a 'periodic table' of different machine learning approaches... importantly identifying 'gaps' between approaches which may yield new ways of doing various learning techniques.

I-Con: A Unifying Framework for Representation Learning

aerophilic — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 16:08:12 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.16929

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44193004

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by aerophilic in "Ask HN: How do I learn robotics in 2025?"

aerophilic — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 16:29:43 +0000

Honestly, and I feel like a promoter… but get either a hackpack from Mark Rober or as otherwise mentioned, mindstorms from LEGO.

Crunch labs: https://www.crunchlabs.com/

As someone in the industry (I literally can call myself a Robot Master having a Masters Degree in Robotics), these simple “kid kits” are phenomenal. When you first start out, the hardest part is knowing the hardware is actually going to do what you tell it to do. Simplifying the mechanical engineering/electrical engineering so you can immediately create real world actions makes a huge difference in giving you motivation to keep going.

Once you have the basics in place and you understand mechanisms, sensors, and some algorithms, you can move on to other parts of robotics.

However, keep in mind robotics is really about system thinking… you have to understand trades between sensing, thinking, and acting. But most importantly you have to remember you are dealing with the real world… you can’t as easily write a unit test and know that a particular actuator will behave exactly the same way every time.

New comment by aerophilic in "Space Selfie"

aerophilic — Thu, 29 May 2025 17:24:22 +0000

They don’t… just do whichever one you are most interested in doing. Each box more or less stands alone (at least that is what I am observing from my kids assembly of them)

New comment by aerophilic in "Space Selfie"

aerophilic — Tue, 27 May 2025 21:45:19 +0000

My kids have loved watching Mark Robers videos, have the subscriptions (one of both the backpack and crunchpack), and we uploaded our video for SatGus.

If you have young kids (6-15) these are perfect educational tools. Highly recommend. Only downside is some of them are a bit “mischievous”. For example a “Bobbie trap” that launches balls at whomever tripped the wire. Good times…

New comment by aerophilic in "The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source"

aerophilic — Mon, 19 May 2025 21:17:17 +0000

This has been a pain point for us and our development process… not all versions of Nvidia drivers are the same… even released ones. You have to find a “good” version and keep to it, and then selectively upgrade… at least this has been the case the last 5 years, folks shout out if they have had different experiences.

Side note: our main use case is using cuda for image processing.

Lockheed's Take on Lunar Architecture (Video)

aerophilic — Sun, 18 May 2025 14:59:04 +0000

Article URL: https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/capabilities/space/human-space-exploration/water-based-lunar-architecture.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44021867

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by aerophilic in "Bike-mounted sensor could boost the mapping of safe cycling routes"

aerophilic — Sat, 17 May 2025 23:47:52 +0000

Just to plug a friend… Velo.ai does similar things… but has other stuff going on: https://www.velo.ai/

Interesting to see how these two would compare, but my first (light) glance points to velo.ai being further along…

New comment by aerophilic in "NASA, Axiom Space Change Assembly Order of Commercial Space Station"

aerophilic — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 05:21:04 +0000

It seems to me that if SLS goes… so does Gateway. That said, one thing to note: There are not that many stable lunar orbits. Unlike the earth, the moon is very lumpy. It is the reason why most lunar orbiters end up doing a planned crash as their end of (relatively) short life. From that standpoint, orbits that are a bit further out are much more appealing to have relatively low delta v requirements.

All that said, once Starship is regularly in use for lunar delivery… I suspect we will have a fundamental new paradigm for space.

RP Flip – Research vessel that goes from ship to platform

aerophilic — Sun, 01 Dec 2024 05:44:53 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RP_FLIP

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42286476

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by aerophilic in "Why VCs love obnoxious founders"

aerophilic — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 13:51:02 +0000

Reading this, this line deeply resonated: “People that out of necessity grow a thick skin with not fitting in and being OK standing out.”

I think this is a pre req to trying to do what a founder is working to do: Change fundamental belief states of the vast majority of people. It is extremely uncomfortable to stake out a position no one else believes in… yet. It requires courage (and thick skin) to get people through the disbelief curve.

New comment by aerophilic in "Shoplifters Love Lego"

aerophilic — Sat, 06 Jul 2024 06:57:58 +0000

They insist likely due to the “Kleenex” effect. Couldn’t find a good reference, but once an item becomes generic, it can loose copyright.

Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/smarter-living/how-a-bran...

Physicists Accidentally Found a New Way to Represent Pi

aerophilic — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 04:05:46 +0000

Article URL: https://www.sciencealert.com/mathematicians-accidentally-found-a-new-way-to-represent-pi

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40772589

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Amid roadkill epidemic, California builds largest wildlife bridge

aerophilic — Mon, 27 May 2024 22:19:14 +0000

Article URL: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/05/27/wildlife-crossing-bridge-california/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40495294

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

The high cost of low wages (2006)

aerophilic — Sat, 25 May 2024 13:59:59 +0000

Article URL: https://hbr.org/2006/12/the-high-cost-of-low-wages

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40475119

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by aerophilic in "US drug control agency will move to reclassify marijuana"

aerophilic — Wed, 01 May 2024 05:50:07 +0000

Question: If this change goes into effect, will it effectively open up banking for all the cannabis related/cannabis adjacent companies? Seems like a really smart move to bring them into the financial system.

New comment by aerophilic in "An electric new era for Atlas"

aerophilic — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 13:30:51 +0000

The best resource I have found for “news” has been Andra Keay’s newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/comm/newsletters/710308591124398489...

In it she covers the latest and greatest robot news, with occasional commentary/perspectives.

However to more directly answer your question, you need to know/talk to someone in the industry at the moment. I am not aware of a single “spot” that gives an honest in depth appraisal of where we are.

From my experience there is a ton of new “hardware” coming out, not just in the humanoid space (Agility Robotics being imho the most “real”), but also in lower cost robot arms, end effectors, sensors, and compute.

Where things are harder to track is where we really are in the software realm. If you look at software driving this hardware, most of it is early stages. Perhaps TRL level 3 to 5 at best. The higher TRL is non-intelligent control software (that is based on decades of work). The newer, AI/Machine Learning/“Smart” software tends to only have limited roll out. At best it will be a startup at the relatively early stages, but more often then not it is still a researcher sitting at a University or a large corporations research lab. In either of those cases, you will see single to at most double digit examples of those systems actually doing work.

However, to your point, it is super easy to create a single (or even a series) of cool videos… it just takes one success in 100s of takes. It is harder to make something that will perform day in and day out and really change the industry/world.

A new generation of smart robots could take over farm tasks handled by humans [video]