Hacker News: fsh

New comment by fsh in "I don't understand quantum physics (2018)"

fsh — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 12:35:51 +0000

I disagree. The human brain is difficult to understand due to the extreme complexity. Quantum mechanics is weird even for simple arrangements of a few building blocks such as the double-slit experiment or Bell tests.

New comment by fsh in "Physicists trap a single antimatter particle for a month"

fsh — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 12:32:56 +0000

Exciting results. The electron's magnetic moment is probably the most precise standard model prediction, and Gabrielse's group has measured it with 13 digits of accuracy. The positron is predicted to have exactly the same magnetic moment, but this has not been measured since 1987. With the new trap, they should be able to finally match the electron's precision.

New comment by fsh in "Getting ready to operate GNU Taler in Germany"

fsh — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 17:24:54 +0000

Taler is privacy-preserving for the payer, but not for the payee. This solves many legal issues such as tax evasion and money laundering.

New comment by fsh in "A death, a plagiarism scandal and a quest for revenge: the tale of Otto Z"

fsh — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 16:29:15 +0000

The Oxford comma is optional according to the Guardian style guide: https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-style-guide-o

New comment by fsh in "Source code of the Estonian online voting system"

fsh — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 02:59:47 +0000

The lack of clear evidence for manipulation in Estonia is not a strong argument to introduce it in a more high-value target. Switzerland has been "trialing" e-voting for decades with very limited success.

New comment by fsh in "Source code of the Estonian online voting system"

fsh — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 01:45:19 +0000

There is plenty of doubt about the Estonian voting system [1]. It would be an extremely bad idea to use it in a country with more international influence.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Estonia

New comment by fsh in "Teams in Vienna and Beijing have built the first thorium nuclear clocks"

fsh — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 08:36:26 +0000

They measured the stability by comparing the nuclear clocks with more stable conventional atomic clocks. In Vienna, they used a commercial single-ion optical clock [1], and in Beijing they used a hydrogen maser (a type of microwave atomic clocks) that was calibrated to the International Atomic Time scale via GNSS satellites.

[1] https://www.toptica.com/products/optical-quantum-clocks/topt...

New comment by fsh in "Teams in Vienna and Beijing have built the first thorium nuclear clocks"

fsh — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 05:23:44 +0000

The nuclear clock uses 229Th though which has an 8000 year half life and does not occur in nature at all.

New comment by fsh in "Powerless F1 drivers frustrated by Bahrain F1 software glitch"

fsh — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 05:40:48 +0000

Banning teams like Ferrari or Mercedes from competing with their own cars (including the engines) would be the end of F1. The current regulations are extremely ambitious such that constructors can get a significant advantage from developing better tech. And it's working, the Mercedes powertrain is clearly dominating, even though the Ford V8 is more powerful.

New comment by fsh in "Powerless F1 drivers frustrated by Bahrain F1 software glitch"

fsh — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 05:13:59 +0000

F1 is a constructors championship, and the constructors are interested in developing electric power trains. Nobody wants to spend 100 million to tweak the last 0.1% performance out of a turbo-charged V8.

New comment by fsh in "US Forces Exit Iraq"

fsh — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 07:30:46 +0000

The article summarizes interviews with various interest groups in the region. Exactly what you would expect from a news agency like Reuters.

New comment by fsh in "Scientists build most accurate atomic clock"

fsh — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 17:09:32 +0000

2.6% natural abundance is more than enough to load an ion trap. Photoionization is so selective that one can load 46Ca from a sample with natural abundance (0.004%).

New comment by fsh in "Apple M6 Pro Achieves the Highest Single-Core CPU Score in Geekbench 7"

fsh — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 10:16:06 +0000

It is not quite twice the score of a 6 year old Apple M1 though. And this is with much higher clock speeds (4.8 GHz vs. 3.2 GHz).

New comment by fsh in "How good are frontier models at physics?"

fsh — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 20:50:02 +0000

Half of the benchmarks don't have published answers. That's why training data providers have been hiring physicists to solve them.

New comment by fsh in "How good are frontier models at physics?"

fsh — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 20:02:50 +0000

I would be very surprised if any of the frontier models wasn't trained on all public physics benchmarks. Training data providers have been hiring people for exactly this task.

New comment by fsh in "Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?"

fsh — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 05:23:33 +0000

So after chasing AWS for two decades, they are still dwarved by them.

New comment by fsh in "Private German rocket makes history, reaches orbit from European soil"

fsh — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 06:52:24 +0000

You are still ~500 m/s short compared to launching on an equatorial orbit from the equator.

New comment by fsh in "Private German rocket makes history, reaches orbit from European soil"

fsh — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 02:55:02 +0000

Launching far off the equator makes it more difficult and is therefore a bigger technological achievement.

New comment by fsh in "RSA-260 Factorized"

fsh — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 09:34:40 +0000

Photonic quantum interfaces typically operate at glacial speeds and with terrible fidelities. There is a lot more missing than good qubits.

New comment by fsh in "RSA-260 Factorized"

fsh — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 09:27:24 +0000

Electrical engineers in the 1940s already had "infinitely stable" memory in the form of delay lines and Williams tubes. Quantum error correction is incomparably more difficult than using digital bits.