Hacker News: evanb

New comment by evanb in "The She-Wolves of Jülich"

evanb — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 01:29:29 +0000

I worked in Jülich just shy of 6 years and never heard this story! I don't know if people know it and are shy about it or don't know it. But I've taken the tour of the citadel (which also serves as the local history museum) and didn't catch it there either.

New comment by evanb in "In Hilbert space, all things are quantumly possible"

evanb — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 14:57:26 +0000

Gell-Mann's totalitarian principle: in quantum mechanics anything not forbidden is compulsory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarian_principle

New comment by evanb in "Anthropic logged net loss of over $80B in first half of 2026"

evanb — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 00:29:55 +0000

I thought all of this machine learning business was about minimizing the loss.

Apple broke an essential presentation feature of iPads

evanb — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 12:17:28 +0000

Article URL: https://teddysvoronos.com/2026-10-19-apple-broke-an-essential-presentation-feature-of-ipads/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50165208

Points: 609

# Comments: 296

New comment by evanb in "Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?"

evanb — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 13:55:42 +0000

You can adjust the speed of light and hold the fine structure constant (and all other dimensionless parameters) fixed by adjusting some of the other dimensionful parameters.

New comment by evanb in "Biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle"

evanb — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 19:46:48 +0000

But you could collect this data point by chance in a bigger or smaller detector.

What I was addressing was whether this detector is big enough for a reliable discovery. In that case what you really want to constrain is the rate, such-and-such events per kilogram of xenon per year (the per-kilogram-of-xenon can be traded for a per-liter rate given the density of the xenon).

New comment by evanb in "Biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle"

evanb — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 10:23:39 +0000

No one knows if it’s big enough—-that depends on the properties of dark matter and its interaction with xenon.

New comment by evanb in "Biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle"

evanb — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 11:45:36 +0000

Whether or not they've "seen" 3x more events is a little bit of a tricky question, because while they may have captured 3x the data exposure (see sibling comments) experiments often operate blinded to the data. They can develop their analysis scripts, play out various different scenarios via Monte Carlo simulation, and get their whole pipeline working without the bias of actually seeing how each change in algorithm alters the outcome for the real data.

Then, at some point, they freeze their pipeline, "open the box", run the analysis on the real data, and report what they find. But they can only "open the box" once per exposure, after that you can worry that human bias can creep in.

New comment by evanb in "Biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle"

evanb — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 11:39:29 +0000

Maybe there are even dark scientists trying to explain the missing 15% of the universe! One such scientist, easily pegged as a kook, suggests a model with SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1) gauge symmetry, with one sector spontaneously broken by a scalar field, and three flavors of fermions to allow for enough CP violation and masses spanning 10 or 11 orders of magnitude.

New comment by evanb in "Biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle"

evanb — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 11:32:08 +0000

The total cost of this experiment may be a lot less than you expect. I'd encourage you to make a guess as to what you think it could cost the US taxpayer and then check what the Department of Energy contributed [1].

The LZ collaboration is going to run their machine until at least 2030. They have almost no hope of making a meaningfully larger detector, no will you hear them suggest one. Their detector is already designed at such a scale that it contains a substantial fraction of all the needed xenon isotope available on Earth.

[1] https://news.wisc.edu/dark-matter-detection-receives-10-ton-...

New comment by evanb in "Biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle"

evanb — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 11:22:57 +0000

Yeah but no matter how hard I look I never seem to be able to read anyone else's email. Maybe OpenAI's upcoming models can help me find those references.

New comment by evanb in "Longest Straight Line Paths on Water or Land on the Earth (2018)"

evanb — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 12:33:29 +0000

They aren't, as clicking through on a sibling's link demonstrates. Moreover, Senegal is nowhere near Cape Town.

New comment by evanb in "Black hole singularity is a surface not a point"

evanb — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 11:21:55 +0000

Both / they're related. More mass gravitates more.

Suppose you had an infinite universe that was filled with a cool gas of low uniform density. Then the gravitational field at any particular point would be 0, by Gauss' law.

But, if you wait a brief moment the gas will not stay uniform, because each atom of the gas will have some velocity. You'll observe fluctuations: places with small over-density and small under-density (compared to the average). The places with over-density will gravitate more than the average and places with under-density will gravitate less, and gravity will cause the gas to clump.

Wait a few billion years and some places will have amalgamated whole galaxies' worth of matter around them and other places will be empty.

New comment by evanb in "Black hole singularity is a surface not a point"

evanb — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 20:54:22 +0000

No, sorry, the singular surface in a Schwarzschild spacetime is not the event horizon. Nothing particularly interesting (from the GR point of view) happens at the event horizon.

New comment by evanb in "Black hole singularity is a surface not a point"

evanb — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 20:52:52 +0000

Yes it is?

New comment by evanb in "Olo (Color)"

evanb — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 23:03:42 +0000

This page, which predates the recent olo work, calls it psychedelic aquamarine. https://jila.colorado.edu/~ajsh/colour/primary.html

Eigendrum

evanb — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 20:43:03 +0000

Article URL: https://eigendrum.com/#p=square

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49291599

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by evanb in "The only road in London where you have to drive on the right"

evanb — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:38:34 +0000

Also the whole of the Virgin Islands!

New comment by evanb in "ArXiv's Next Chapter"

evanb — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 11:05:21 +0000

I’m RSS-subscribed to a few sections relevant to my research.

New comment by evanb in "Alan Greenspan has died"

evanb — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 11:12:13 +0000

The gilded age’s wealthy were also the winners of winner-take-all technologies such as the railroad and oil.