Hacker News: smartscience

New comment by smartscience in "How Passive Radar Works"

smartscience — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 12:34:40 +0000

Are there any clever tricks for the data processing involved here, given that the delay is a shift in the time domain and the Doppler effect is a shift in the frequency domain? Maybe involving fractional Fourier transforms, or wavelets?

New comment by smartscience in "Python classes aren’t always the best solution"

smartscience — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 22:10:38 +0000

Good point. I wasn't sure from the given examples that overuse of classes in this way was all that harmful, e.g. the performance penalty hopefully shouldn't be all that significant. But then I remembered all the Python code I've seen that was obviously written by capable and experienced C++ programmers.

New comment by smartscience in "Bitchat – A decentralized messaging app that works over Bluetooth mesh networks"

smartscience — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 16:50:28 +0000

For a real-world use case, maybe cruise ships? Internet service on the ships is expensive if it works at all, but that's not necessarily what people need - they just need to be able to exchange whatsapp style messages with people already on the same ship, especially if they can't find each other. Music festivals, mentioned elsewhere in this thread, might face a similar issue as they can be in remote locations.

New comment by smartscience in "Why you can hear the temperature of water"

smartscience — Sat, 11 May 2024 13:32:58 +0000

The McGurk effect https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k8fHR9jKVM is another example, which might be described as people learning to lip read without them being aware that they have done so.

New comment by smartscience in "Show HN: I'm 16 and building an AI based startup called Factful with friends"

smartscience — Wed, 01 May 2024 20:06:14 +0000

Searle, is that you?

New comment by smartscience in "Niklaus Wirth has died"

smartscience — Wed, 03 Jan 2024 20:46:27 +0000

I always knew my experience with RISC OS wouldn't go to waste!

New comment by smartscience in "Some tactics for writing in public"

smartscience — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 00:00:05 +0000

Any way? There are left-leaning social positions that would be entirely expected from a modern tech-focused VC company. I support those causes and positions to various extents (if not always their approach to advocacy and addressing other viewpoints), but they're still left leaning.

New comment by smartscience in "Online Lens/Optics Simulator"

smartscience — Sat, 25 Feb 2023 20:57:10 +0000

+1 for also looking for a tool like this (online or otherwise) before, and being disappointed with what I found previously. Two projects immediately spring to mind: firstly, we have a theodolite to align some lab equipment, which I'd like to add a live digital camera to, and secondly we're designing a material heating system based on halogen tubes, for which we need to optimise the shapes of reflectors around the bulbs, subject to some geometry constraints.

I'd not seen the sharedigm.com platform before either, possibly itself also interesting for other things.

New comment by smartscience in "Signal says it'll shut down in UK if Online Safety Bill approved"

smartscience — Sat, 25 Feb 2023 13:59:09 +0000

I've heard this can happen where money laundering is suspected. Apparently the banks aren't allowed to tip off the account owner that they're being investigated, with the result that the account owner's subsequent interactions with the bank become kafkaesque.

New comment by smartscience in "An FDA-approved asthma drug has shown the ability to restore memories in mice"

smartscience — Sat, 11 Feb 2023 20:54:57 +0000

The drug in the article is roflumilast, which seems to share some structure with the nootropic ampakine CX-546. I've never consumed that, but I've had some experience with IDRA-21 doing something like what the article describes, such as having vivid dreams of minor chart hits from decades ago that I'd previously gone a long time without being reminded of.

New comment by smartscience in "Mercedes-Benz to introduce acceleration subscription fee"

smartscience — Sat, 26 Nov 2022 20:06:14 +0000

Unauthorised third-party modifications and add-ons may end up being part of the solution here. It's already established that this can be a viable business model with e.g. car accessories, games consoles and printer inks. I can see a market for one-off DIY modifications to various things that unlock what was intended to be a subscription feature.

A related issue is the increasing possiblity of devices being effectively bricked because some cloud service or online system has ceased support. Could there be a niche for a company selling improved after-market firmware for other companies' devices?

New comment by smartscience in "Euclidean rhythms"

smartscience — Sun, 13 Nov 2022 21:24:33 +0000

I never thought I'd see the issue of pulse selection in spallation neutron sources referred to on HN, let alone linked to music theory. In practice, most systems that select a subset of these pulses will select 1 pulse in every 2^n pulses, so fancy patterns aren't needed. But I work at a facility where 1 in every 5 pulses are removed in order to supply another part of the site, and where the particular instrument I work with uses 1 in every 2 or 3 pulses. At the moment, the selection of 1 in 2-3 pulses is accomplished with a spinning disc ('chopper') with a hole in it, to let though the required fraction of pulses. But the spin speed of the disc must generally be constant once set, meaning sometimes it lets though one of the missing 1-in-5 pulses that were already diverted somewhere else. We would need a better switching method to let through arbitrary irregularly spaced patterns of neutrons. I think I worked out once that it could offer the most advantage when running in our 1-in-3 mode.

New comment by smartscience in "Ask HN: Where are all the mechanical engineers?"

smartscience — Thu, 10 Nov 2022 19:30:02 +0000

There's imechanica.org, I followed it more closely in my time at university but not sure what it's like more recently.

New comment by smartscience in "Improper Nouns"

smartscience — Fri, 02 Sep 2022 17:53:39 +0000

Incidentally this is why I see no problem with phrases like 'PIN number', despite others apparently being very bothered by them. English does not use a macro preprocessor to expand acronyms.

New comment by smartscience in "The Failure Mode of Clever (2010)"

smartscience — Sat, 06 Aug 2022 22:24:10 +0000

"To Avoid Criticism, Say Nothing, Do Nothing, Be Nothing"... https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/01/09/say-nothing/

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

smartscience — Mon, 04 Apr 2022 21:31:56 +0000

If you want to go digging on Usenet, check out Albert Silvermann (I think it was) on rec.music.theory.

New comment by smartscience in "Freud's nephew and the origins of public relations (2009)"

smartscience — Fri, 04 Feb 2022 19:12:35 +0000

Obligatory https://xkcd.com/125/

New comment by smartscience in "Why isn't there a replication crisis in math?"

smartscience — Wed, 02 Feb 2022 21:04:38 +0000

If a flawed mathematical paper were used as the basis for what then became a flawed cryptography algorithm, I can see that having impact if the bad guys noticed the flaw first. But yes, I expect examples like that would be comparatively rare.

New comment by smartscience in "The UN is testing technology that processes data confidentially"

smartscience — Tue, 01 Feb 2022 17:47:01 +0000

While opinion is split on this, these days I don't think you can appeal to strictness alone to justify 'data' being plural, given the way usage has already gone. People (like me) who say 'data is...' are simply using data as a mass noun (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_noun), which seems to be a reasonable direction to be taking the language. I may be influenced by the fact that I usually see 'datum' used to refer to a reference point or marker in some arbitrary space, and thus in my mind is now another word separate from 'data' (albeit with shared etymology). If I had more than one datum, I'd call them 'datums', though I've yet to test how acceptable this would be in a formal setting.

New comment by smartscience in "Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'"

smartscience — Tue, 04 Jan 2022 09:27:51 +0000

They claim it's ultimately related to the latin debitum, but the b was lost before being reinserted by prescriptivists later. Not as bad as the s is island, which appears to be based on a false understanding of the etymology https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/island#note-1