Hacker News: blackholesRhot

New comment by blackholesRhot in "Qantas South Africa flights delayed by falling debris from SpaceX rockets"

blackholesRhot — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 19:14:03 +0000

This is only for Starship testing. The issue should go away very soon, after at most a few more Starship tests.

New comment by blackholesRhot in "Qantas South Africa flights delayed by falling debris from SpaceX rockets"

blackholesRhot — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 19:13:38 +0000

This is only for Starship testing and should go away as an issue after a few more Starship tests.

New comment by blackholesRhot in "Peter Eckersley has died"

blackholesRhot — Sat, 03 Sep 2022 15:25:36 +0000

RIP Peter

New comment by blackholesRhot in "The Principles of Deep Learning Theory"

blackholesRhot — Sat, 16 Apr 2022 23:54:24 +0000

Two of the three co-authors, Dan and Sho, come from high energy physics backgrounds. Dan went from pure high energy to the intersection of HEP and quantum information. Boris comes from a pure math background but he has spent a lot of time learning physics as well. People's trainings influence their work :)

New comment by blackholesRhot in "NASA will test SpinLaunch's ability to fling satellites into orbit"

blackholesRhot — Thu, 14 Apr 2022 21:29:02 +0000

FYI I'm a Spinlaunch invesetor.

Just watched this video. His argument for why Spinlaunch won't work is basically:

1) in the video of their first test chamber (12m diameter) there's some dirt and rust, therefore they don't know anything about vacuums

2) in their first ever test fire of a projectile leaving their 33m chamber, the projectile is wobbling, therefore they don't know anything

3) in a mock up video they made of a future launch system the headquarters is close to the launcher, which might explode if there's a misfire, therefore they don't know anything

4) the founder has an uninspiring resume when you look online

'Add these up and there's no chance they'll succeed. What they've done isn't as impressive as 50+ year old gunships.'

Give me a break. Their rate of progress is exceptional. They've already overcome so many challenges. These are weak arguments. Doesn't mean they'll be successful. But these arguments are weak. Some quick counter-arguments

1-) the 12m test chamber was a demo chamber. they were constantly spinning it up and letting people go inside. doing tours. stress testing new materials and arms. blowing stuff up. if anything the fact that it was so reliable even with the imperfections is a positive

2-) when someone is learning to throw a football there's tons of wobble. spinlaunch needs to figure out a perfect spiral. these videos were from their first couple attempts ever out of a chamber. what they're showing is very hard. this team has shown an ability to innovate and improve. those were images of their first few attempts to "throw the football"

3-) give the team some credit. these videos are designed for the general public. what they built already has an incredible amount of kinetic energy. they stress tested many tethers (past their limits) before going to this scale. when you're picking on things as small as "they're going to kill themselves by sitting right next to the system" you clearly don't have much left to nitpick

4-) jonathan is an absolute genius. just because he has a spartan online bio and unorthodox background doesn't mean he's not an absolute force of nature. thunderf00t is a very smart dude. but i'd bet anything that in a debate -- on basically any topic -- jonathan would absolutely decimate thunderf00t

cheers to the builders

New comment by blackholesRhot in "Ham radio and astronauts"

blackholesRhot — Fri, 25 Dec 2020 06:14:45 +0000

I was lucky enough to participate in one of these "educational programs". When I was in 6th grade I was selected to learn HAM radio and ask a question to the astronauts aboard STS-93. The program was called "Shuttle Amateur Radio Experiment" (SAREX). Long live SAREX!

New comment by blackholesRhot in "Lambda School’s Misleading Promises"

blackholesRhot — Thu, 20 Feb 2020 02:18:49 +0000

"Yeah, got cut for brevity, but students definitely experience serious anxiety about even the five year horizon."

Lambda School is <5 years old. Pretty disingenuous man.

New comment by blackholesRhot in "Even Physicists Don’t Understand Quantum Mechanics"

blackholesRhot — Sun, 08 Sep 2019 03:50:39 +0000

Completely agree.

New comment by blackholesRhot in "On Mathematical Beauty in Physics"

blackholesRhot — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 01:13:20 +0000

Couldn't agree more.

New comment by blackholesRhot in "The Birthday Paradox – On Jupiter, and Beyond (2012)"

blackholesRhot — Sun, 03 Mar 2019 22:26:40 +0000

the authors are basically rediscovering Chen-Stein’s concept of Poisson approximation... which can be used to almost trivially approximate any birthday problem variant. For example, how many people do you need to have a 50% Probability that at least 6 people were born on the same day on Jupiter? Ez w/ Poisson approximation. I first learned about this in Persi Diaconis’ graduate probability class but the method is very simple

https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.ss/1177012015

New comment by blackholesRhot in "Orbits and orbitals (2006)"

blackholesRhot — Sat, 12 Jan 2019 22:35:59 +0000

These concepts make more sense after one has been exposed to quantum mechanics. One of the first things you do in an intro to quantum mechanics class is calculate the energy levels of a Hydrogen atom (and then Helium.) Chemistry is literally applied quantum mechanics; and everything in quantum mechanics is probabilistic. A more accurate picture of an orbital is that it’s an energy level where a cloud of probability mass lives that corresponds to, if one were to take a photograph of the atom, the likelihood of finding an electron in any given location (wave function collapse.) But before a measurement, the electron really was a cloud of probability mass.

New comment by blackholesRhot in "Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy"

blackholesRhot — Wed, 28 Nov 2018 20:41:47 +0000

I respect Schneier but this is basically 10x-ing the word count on Terry Tao’s 2016 blog post:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/terrytao.wordpress.com/2016/06/...

Unacceptable to me that it wasn’t referenced as it certainly made the rounds in security circles.

New comment by blackholesRhot in "Misconfigured datastore services abound in the cloud"

blackholesRhot — Wed, 21 Mar 2018 17:56:16 +0000

Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure tutorials default to insecure datastore configurations; AWS, Rackspace and SoftLayer are better

Misconfigured datastore services abound in the cloud

blackholesRhot — Wed, 21 Mar 2018 17:55:41 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/qadium/misconfigured-datastore-services-abound-in-the-cloud-dba68260dc58

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16640658

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

The science that made Stephen Hawking famous (2014)

blackholesRhot — Wed, 14 Mar 2018 17:56:14 +0000

Article URL: https://quantumfrontiers.com/2014/11/05/the-science-that-made-stephen-hawking-famous/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16586809

Points: 9

# Comments: 1

New comment by blackholesRhot in "A Clarification"

blackholesRhot — Sat, 16 Dec 2017 19:39:21 +0000

One favorable interpretation is that he’s trying to say something similar to what Richard Muller said here

https://www.quora.com/What-is-your-opinion-on-the-UC-Berkele...

In the 60s and 70s UC Berkeley used to let controversial speakers present. The audience would listen patiently. And then take turns asking questions trying to catch the racist / bigot / Nazi / homophobe / whatever in the midst of logical failures. Now we just protest and shut down ideas via claims of political correctness. It’s not nearly as effective.

New comment by blackholesRhot in "What I Learned from Losing $200M (2015)"

blackholesRhot — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 22:50:43 +0000

Also, this hedge became an extremely famous trade in the years to come, netting Mexico $8B in savings.

https://www.ft.com/content/ccd87f9e-9bd9-11de-b214-00144feab...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-04-04/uncoverin...

New comment by blackholesRhot in "What I Learned from Losing $200M (2015)"

blackholesRhot — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 22:45:58 +0000

I was working in the crude oil / nat gas options pit at the NYMEX during the summer of 2008 when these trades went down (where much of Mexico's hedge was traded but not necessarily the author's portion.) A highly ironic part of this story is that the traders in the pit selling to Mexico thought they were getting an incredible deal. Both because the price of crude was so high at the time but also because they were able to "fade" the market. When you're in a pit like this, there are only ~100 "seats". At the time this meant 100 people who had firms with enough cash to front ~$1.5M so that you could stand for 6.5 straight hours in a tiny space at the NYMEX and shout back and forth. Basically what happens is someone will yell out to the other 100 people "what's the market on DEC'9 crude?" The point is they aren't supposed to say whether they want to buy or sell. Other people will yell out the prices they'd be willing to buy or sell at and the quantity. Say someone is willing to sell 200k options at $100/option, and someone else likes that price, they can yell "sold, 50 DEC'9 crude at 100." meaning they just bought 50k options expiring in December 2009. For this particular trade, there were three brokers that were known for representing mexico's hedge in previous years. Traders were expecting them to come back around this time. When one of these brokers came into the pit and yelled out "what's the market on DEC '9 crude" traders guessed he was hedging for mexico and quoted a price a full dollar above where the market was at. A bunch of people piled on willing to sell at even higher prices. The brokers had no choice but to accept this higher price. I was just a 22 year-old DRW intern on loan from a Stanford PhD program and in my head I was thinking "what the hell is going on.. that's not the fair price. I need to be selling!" I didn't actually sell anything because I didn't have the confidence or authority (it was my first month). But a senior trader explained this to me on our walk back to 7 world trade center after.

New comment by blackholesRhot in "D-Wave Systems Previews 2000-Qubit Quantum System"

blackholesRhot — Thu, 29 Sep 2016 01:33:22 +0000

There were a couple papers a year ago showing pretty convincingly that yes there is some entanglement between some of its qubits. But from what I've seen there's zero evidence that they've done anything that would be hard for a classical computer. All signs thus far point to snake oil, but with a genuinely great team. They'll probably do something interesting 5 years from now and then Geordie will point back at all the naysayers and say "see I told you so!!"

New comment by blackholesRhot in "String Theory’s Strange Second Life"

blackholesRhot — Fri, 16 Sep 2016 22:13:38 +0000

A few comments as someone who works on the periphery of this field:

1. I started my PhD doing quantum information. People in quantum information spend a lot of time thinking about properties of entanglement. Someone below mentioned "a lack of new ideas". There have been quite a few important ideas in AdS/CFT (as a subset of string theory) over the past decade. One of the most exciting is called the Ryu-Takayanagi conjecture and it relates the amount of entanglement in a subsystem to the area of a minimal surface bounding said subregion.

2. Again, as someone who started purely as a QI person, it's shocking how much of the MATH of string theory has entered my research.

3. In my opinion, it's true that string theory hasn't made much progress over the past 20 years or so towards elucidating its potential role as a theory of quantum gravity; but in parallel there are amazing connections being made between string theory and quantum information. Look at the work being done by the "It from Qubit" collaboration for a sampling. This latter point is ~equally related to the recent decoherence of string theory as a subdiscipline. It's more like it tunneled to a state closer to QI.

4. The Firewall paradox is fascinating and it was originated by a bunch of string theorists (Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski and Sully.)

5. Supersymmetry is in a corner; which is bad for string theory. But string theory is proving to be a powerful lens through which to study quantum entanglement. One step back, one step forward?

Anyways, saying that "string theory is our savior" or anything like that is bad etiquette. But the community is doing interesting things today.