Hacker News: alphydan

New comment by alphydan in "Sharper MRI scans may be on horizon thanks to new physics-based model"

alphydan — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 16:06:20 +0000

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

New comment by alphydan in "John Jumper: AI is revolutionizing scientific discovery [video]"

alphydan — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 10:37:44 +0000

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

New comment by alphydan in "A qualitative analysis of pig-butchering scams"

alphydan — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 13:51:31 +0000

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.

New comment by alphydan in "ADHD drug treatment and risk of negative events and outcomes"

alphydan — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 12:47:56 +0000

> 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.

New comment by alphydan in "Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?"

alphydan — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 00:26:36 +0000

https://alvarofeito.com/

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

New comment by alphydan in "Double Descent in Human Learning"

alphydan — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 09:48:08 +0000

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).

New comment by alphydan in "Ask HN: Best way to “donate” dev hours to charity?"

alphydan — Mon, 03 Apr 2023 17:21:09 +0000

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)

New comment by alphydan in "Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?"

alphydan — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 11:43:59 +0000

> 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).

New comment by alphydan in "Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?"

alphydan — Sun, 01 Jan 2023 21:37:29 +0000

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.

New comment by alphydan in "Building an interpreter for my programming language with ChatGPT"

alphydan — Sun, 04 Dec 2022 22:16:26 +0000

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?

New comment by alphydan in "People Who Apply for Jobs by Showing Up"

alphydan — Sun, 24 Jul 2022 18:36:25 +0000

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).

New comment by alphydan in "What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists (2016)"

alphydan — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 02:13:47 +0000

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.

A Gentle introduction to gravitational wave mathematics

alphydan — Fri, 20 Aug 2021 11:50:25 +0000

Article URL: https://alvarofeito.com/articles/ligo/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28244999

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by alphydan in "Powering the Lunar Base"

alphydan — Sat, 07 Aug 2021 17:26:13 +0000

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

Curve: An automatic market maker for stablecoins

alphydan — Wed, 17 Feb 2021 20:02:04 +0000

Article URL: https://alvarofeito.com/articles/curve/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26170915

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by alphydan in "Video Games Are the Future of Education"

alphydan — Sun, 21 Jun 2020 21:50:20 +0000

>> 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.

New comment by alphydan in "Hyperdrive v10 – a peer-to-peer filesystem"

alphydan — Thu, 14 May 2020 18:20:56 +0000

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

Covid drug makes virus mutate to death

alphydan — Sat, 02 May 2020 10:39:12 +0000

Article URL: https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/12/541/eabb5883

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23050890

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by alphydan in "Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?"

alphydan — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 16:31:26 +0000

> 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".

New comment by alphydan in "Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?"

alphydan — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 01:49:31 +0000

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.