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well done!


I did much of my PhD work on high-dimensional tetrahedral complexes (so-called simplicial complexes), and somehow was unaware of this lovely and quite intuitive result.

Thanks, John Cook!


When I TA'd computability & complexity as a graduate student, I always loved giving this proof of Godel's Theorem as an easy corollary of the Halting Problem as a homework assignment.

It's beautiful, elegant, and easy to understand. I was introduced to the proof by a note in Sipser's text.


Thanks for sharing, Stefan. Lots to be proud of in what Starsky achieved, and factors outside your control at work at the end.

Excited to see what you do next.


I wouldn't set up a corporation until you have either a reasonable amount of cash coming in or someone ready to give you a check. After that, I'd start with an LLC in your home state, unless you think there's a chance you'll take outside investment. If you do, conversion to a Delaware C-corp costs around $10K in legal fees.


I thought that an LLC in California required a yearly fee that was close to a $1000 the last time I looked. Is that no longer true or not true at all? Related - isn't it much cheaper in other states?


Yea, $850 franchise tax minimum. I personally think it's a bit excess even by Californian standards.

Also, you'd need to get an office in Delaware to not mandate a foreign registration in California which still involves the taxes. Getting an office in Delaware is pretty expensive but it's about $400 cheaper than California franchise tax. They assess their own but it still works out lower.

Edit: Nevermind, they still tax you on that. I don't condone tax evasion, but Wyoming doesn't track the owners of a corporation.


Yes, the franchise tax. You can't get out of it by incorporating in another state. CA residents pay CA taxes.


+1 to this advice. Don't incorporate until you're already paying yourself a good salary. The wrong structure can easily cost you thousands per year in taxes and fees.


Would it be "piercing the corporate veil" to accept payments before incorporating, then moving everything to separate accounts afterwards?


No you simply convert the sole proprietorship to an LLC (or corporation). You "sell" your intellectual property to the newly created corporation in exchange for your founder stock. A sole proprietorship is sort of like the default business structure, you don't really need to do anything to start it, everything just ends up on your personal tax return.

"Piercing the corporate veil" is different. Google will be helpful if you're interested, but basically if you run a company don't do shady shit -- don't commit fraud or gross negligence, and respect the separation between company and personal finances. Otherwise you may lose the protection of the corporation (the "limited liability" part of LLC) and become personally liable if things go bad.


Well! As it happens, around the time of this article I was working as a summer research student in Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, carrying out a search for supernovae as part of Saul Perlmutter's Supernova Cosmology group.

When astrophysicists work on this activity, they use (no surprise) computer vision. The lab's software automated the process these nova hunters ran manually: we subtracted two images of every segment of the night sky taken on different dates to see if any new bright objects appeared in the difference. If so, it's possibly a supernovae!

Because there are so many stars out there you can use this method to predictably discover large numbers of supernovae when you need to study them. They called the project the Nearby Supernova Factory ( https://snfactory.lbl.gov/ ); as far as I know this is still the preferred method.


Very cool.

I once attended a session at the Dayton Hamvention (TAPR group) that did a presentation on amateur nova finders. This must have been 20 years ago--I can't find any reference to it. But in any case, this group discovered some large number of novas.

But this sounds like a serious improvement in the methods.

Incidentally, your link doesn't come up right--it should be https://snfactory.lbl.gov/


I enjoyed it, but you should allow me to disable random HackerNews links. That's not the purpose of the extension.


Great suggestion - I'll add an option to disable that.


Congrats, Randall and team!


You can try https://www.hellokip.com/, an app for finding and managing your therapist.


Kevin Fu and team at UMich's security & privacy group provided the most plausible explanation for what's going on here. https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/how-we-reve...


Last time this research was mentioned, many were not impressed by it's overall quality.

Ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16597036


It's only the "most plausible" explanation due to the general lack of public explanations.

It's still an extremely poor explanation.


tl;dr: Two ultrasound devices in the same room can interact to produce audible sound at dangerous volume under some circumstances. Ultrasound devices include bugs, microphone jammers, and many other things.


but if you have two 60db transmitters, the max you can produce (from my understanding) with constructive interference is 70db , since db is logarithmic. so does that mean the transmitters in question were already transmitting at 100+db?


Some ultrasound devices operate at power levels that would be dangerous by themselves if they were at a different frequency. Eg the article mentions "One advertised jammer emits 120-dB ultrasonic interference at a distance of 1 meter".


2x 60dB is 63dB.


If the two sources are coherently phased up you can get 66 dB.


yeah sorry, got apparent loudness and amplitude confused.


While true, the energy delivered to the subject depends on the radiation pattern. A 100W light bulb can help you pick out clothes in the closet, a 100W laser can cut steel (sorta).


A 100W laser cuts acrylic and wood, not steel. This is the power level of hobbyist laser cutters.


That's in part why I said 'sorta', but Kern actually sells a 150w CO2 laser that they will support for metal cutting applications (2mm for mild steel).

I'll conveniently ignore the O2 assist for the sake of counterpoint. :)


Also tl;dr: They don't explain anything about how that can cause the observed symptoms.


Probably because it's possible for people to implement these sort of weapons, and they don't want terrible people inflicting somewhat untraceable brain damage on unsuspecting victims, seemingly out of the blue.

If they're leaving out explicit (or even the vaguest) details, it probably means that's the only thing keeping this out of the hands of weirdos.

Also, other layers of secrecy are likely in play. It's probably already known that such weapons do exactly these things, but how would people even know, without published research? Top secret military experiments? Private research performed by military contractors? (in other words, takes one to know one)


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