[HN Gopher] LK-99
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LK-99
Author : bilsbie
Score : 79 points
Date : 2023-07-27 17:38 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| dwheeler wrote:
| I'm currently skeptical, as these are extraordinary claims.
|
| But it doesn't matter what my current guess is. This claim either
| replicates or it doesn't. I _really_ hope it replicates. If it
| does, then even if this material can 't be _directly_ used to
| change industry, it 's quite likely to lead to materials that do.
| So I'm crossing my fingers!
| icodestuff wrote:
| Huh. The second paper listed different vacuum pressures than the
| first. 10^-3 torr instead of 10^--5.
| mark_feelthree wrote:
| While we're in this phase of Schrodinger's superconductor of
| 'waiting on replication', one thing is clear...
|
| Science is broken.
|
| If they really saw this as being possible in 1999 why has it
| taken so long to progress? Well, I guess it's because they had
| day jobs... but think of what could have changed if it worked 24
| years ago... think of the carbon we've spewed out in a quarter
| century :(
|
| We really need a multi-billion dollar x-prize for tech like
| this... and make it open-source so it's not paywalled behind a
| patent.
|
| Someone get Bill Gates to write a cheque...
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe]
|
| lots of previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36864624
| hcks wrote:
| Wikipedia being cringe as usual. If they waited 72h for it to be
| debunked they would have avoided loosing more credibility.
| distortionfield wrote:
| Did you even read it?
|
| > As of 26 July 2023, the measured properties do not prove that
| LK-99 is a superconductor
|
| What more could you possibly want from them?
| wmf wrote:
| Even if this gets debunked it's already probably noteworthy
| enough for an article.
| ShadowBanThis01 wrote:
| Is what? You forgot the rest of the title.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Comment I saw in a previous thread:
|
| Stone age
|
| Bronze age
|
| Iron age
|
| LK-99 ((r)) age
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36869209
| soligern wrote:
| This is definitely premature. If it's real though, holy cow,
| can't wait for my 200Ghz processor.
| bick_nyers wrote:
| Then I can finally stop prematurely optimizing my code!
| er4hn wrote:
| Up until every Chrome tab spawns a new Fuchsia OS.
| Euphorbium wrote:
| What tasks are cpu limited now? For me none.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Video encoding.
| willis936 wrote:
| The draw calls for the 856th frame of counter strike this
| second won't queue themselves.
| topper-123 wrote:
| Lots and lots of CI is cpu limited, for one thing.
| valine wrote:
| Most of the algorithms we use in machine learning are
| chosen specifically because they parallelize well. If we
| could increase clock speeds arbitrarily high, a huge
| selection of algorithms we passed on would suddenly become
| viable.
| [deleted]
| anonymoushn wrote:
| do you not use web browsers or compilers?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| you'd be surprised how much of what you think is CPU
| limited is actually constrainted by memory bus bandwidth,
| locks, high cache evictions / bad cache use, or I/O.
|
| something as seemingly innocuous as checking and
| incrementing an atomic counter across a bunch of threads
| can induce a 10x performance drop
|
| it's totally batshit insane how much faster things run
| when they're able to work with stuff in L1 cache where
| they're not waiting on slower memory.
|
| modern CPUs are insanely fast and crazy concurrent, but
| the rest of the machine can't keep up.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| I think for tasks like parsing javascript the parser is
| usually unable to saturate memory bandwidth. Whether
| that's because it's parsing to an in-memory
| representation that is a tangle of pointers all over the
| heap or because it is full of unpredictable branches
| seems unimportant as a user.
|
| The story is similar for LLVM. The fact that a CPU-bound
| task can be pessimized into stalling on cache and TLB
| misses all the time doesn't mean that it isn't CPU-bound.
|
| A commonly deployed compression format which is lauded as
| revolutionary has a decoder that contains 0 SIMD
| intrinsics and uses significantly-fewer-than-optimal
| number of interleaved streams (according to papers
| published many years before the format was
| standardized!), which drives up the length of the
| dependency chains, and if you try to decode many chunks
| at the same time then you also get into trouble because
| you can't fit many tables into cache. The decoder does
| not saturate memory bandwidth and toy decoders of similar
| codecs from papers published years before are predictably
| faster.
|
| The more ubiquitous compression formats are worse.
|
| It's common to encounter hash tables that underperform
| robin hood tables that support bulk operations by a
| factor of 100, applications that use red-black trees with
| individually allocated nodes as priority queues (as
| opposed to ternary heaps or b-trees or whatever), and
| sorts that underperform by a factor of 10 compared to
| radix sort of multi-key quick sort because they are
| written in terms of a comparator function that must run
| in its entirety, so that the subset of the items whose
| first-sorted-by field are the same cannot skip this
| comparison. This comparison is commonly a comparison of
| data behind a pointer rather than data present in the
| struct.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I still submit that if you cranked CPU speed 10x or 100x
| higher than now that you'd just hit the wall so hard that
| actual quality of life improvements would not be 10x or
| 100x at all, unless you could simultaneously make bus
| speeds and memory speeds jump with it (presumably magic
| superconductor would do that, too, I dunno.)
|
| Specialized workloads, for sure.
| capableweb wrote:
| Not just CPU speeds would be able to be increased though,
| lots of others could be increased too.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Program synthesis/symbolic regression.
| [deleted]
| whoopdedo wrote:
| My speakers will sound so much better with LK-99 Monster
| Brand cables.
| yellowcake0 wrote:
| this doesn't even make sense
| optimalsolver wrote:
| What's confusing you?
| hcks wrote:
| It's cringe, dude.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Dude, you're now in the LK-99 Age. Learn to live with it.
| yellowcake0 wrote:
| it's not confusing, it's just silly, the Iron Age ended
| over 2000 years ago, so there were just no ages between the
| birth of Christ and LK-99?
| optimalsolver wrote:
| None which are generally accepted by historians that
| happen to be named after a single substance:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-age_system
| yellowcake0 wrote:
| Those are only for prehistory.
|
| In any case it's a pretty silly contrivance, how about
| the oil age? or the silicon age? Both of those are likely
| to remain more impactful than the LK-99 age, in the event
| that it does turn out to be an ambient temp/pressure
| superconductor.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| If replicated, those are gonna be footnotes to LK-99 and
| its likely many derivatives and close cousins.
| maxbond wrote:
| [New person]
|
| Alright, but if we're going to be relying on the
| authority of historians, they don't recognize the LK-99
| age anymore then they recognize the steel,
| plastics/petroleum products, or silicon age though.
|
| I can't speak for anyone else but what struck me as off
| about it was that it felt like boosterism for a
| technology that's so new and poorly understood it that we
| may find out it doesn't actually work at any moment. Even
| if it does work, we have no idea if it's useful in real
| applications or if it needs another decade of refinement.
| It reminded me of AI and cryptoasset evangelism, and made
| me inwardly groan, "here we go again...."
|
| You don't have to write comments according to my
| preferences, I didn't downvote your comment fwiw, that's
| just how I saw it.
| BryanLegend wrote:
| They sat on it for 4 years?
| mark_feelthree wrote:
| Seems like they sat on it for 24 years!!
|
| The 99 refers to 1999.
| carabiner wrote:
| Alex Kaplan (Princeton physics bachelor's, CEO of Cometeer which
| is like Juicero of coffee) thinks it's over:
| https://twitter.com/alexkaplan0/status/1684642852616192000?r...
|
| Edit: He's been breathlessly tweeting his hopes for the compound,
| and has now done complete 180. This is just meant to be a data
| point showing that one hypester has lost faith. His physics
| academic background (which is non-expert but still better than
| the average joe) shows that he's got a tiny bit of credibility,
| but his being of a failing coffee startup shows that he's
| probably got other motives.
| soligern wrote:
| What's the context for this? What does over mean and who did he
| sit down with?
| laluser wrote:
| It's FUD. If you are being so vague without any critical
| argument, then there's nothing of substance here.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| As a Harvard physics bachelor, I don't think an undergrad
| physics degree gives much expert claim at all.
| carabiner wrote:
| Yeah, I think he knew his initial breathless positive
| tweeting would go viral and he was really trying to attract
| new investment for his struggling startup. Which he did.
| saberdancer wrote:
| The guy loves to jump on and off the hype train.
|
| I guess he just now read the paper properly and found some
| inconsistencies.
|
| I'd wait for people to try and replicate. It is obvious that
| the paper was not ready and has mistakes.
| distortionfield wrote:
| Yeah, we should give the author the proper chance to
| replicate and full peer review before making a final call. I
| sympathize withe the frustration of work being seen
| prematurely, it's hard to undo the initial bias.
| [deleted]
| anonymoushn wrote:
| "Juicero of coffee" is like an anti-endorsement
| carabiner wrote:
| Yes that was kind of the point lol
| hcks wrote:
| "Physics bachelor" "CEO of Juicero for coffee"
|
| Also this guy was the one shilling the paper in the first place
| and he's now in damage control mode as he knows that it's BS
| and doesn't want to loose more credibility in the fallback.
| zh3 wrote:
| What would you do if you genuinely believe you'd discovered
| something as potentially important?
|
| 1) Get paranoid, figure out where you've gone wrong
|
| 2) Kicked it as hard as we can, can't find a problem. So...
|
| 3a) Keep this potentially important result under our hats for as
| long as it takes
|
| 3b) publish it with with some risk of embarassmment, and -
| hopefully - get others to either verify the result or point out
| where we went wrong.
|
| I'd always go for b) - after strenuous effort to falsify my own
| theory.
|
| Of course, some people - scientists are not an exception, just
| less susceptibl to it - can't bear to abandon a lovely result.
| wmf wrote:
| In theory you should privately invite someone to replicate your
| work, then publish it if the replication works. You'd probably
| get scooped though, so you have no choice but to arxiv it
| immediately.
| kadoban wrote:
| > In theory you should privately invite someone to replicate
| your work, then publish it if the replication works. You'd
| probably get scooped though, so you have no choice but to
| arxiv it immediately.
|
| What are we optimising for here? I'm not even convinced that
| that's better. What's the harm in the way they went instead,
| assuming they're not frauding.
| wmf wrote:
| Embarrassment, although there may also be some career
| blowback.
| kadoban wrote:
| Ah, I see. I mean, the authors don't terribly seem to be
| worried about that. I thought we were talking about
| better for society or something.
| nwienert wrote:
| 4) Go to your government to get the biggest cash out
| immediately, for the lowest risk (they may be unhappy if you
| didn't disclose it to them first), also putting your nation
| potentially massively ahead of others.
|
| They supposedly started playing with this in 1999. If they
| discovered this stuff nearly two decades ago and SK was let in
| on it, maybe they have a whole array of military projects built
| around it already?
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| If I encounter something world-changing I'd consider it an
| ethical obligation to share it with the world. Show your work,
| be transparent about what you know and what you've found, and
| try to help others in replicating. Maintain humility.
|
| Something I dislike about modern research is that there's not a
| lot of transparency or rapid updates. It wouldn't take someone
| much time to record a few additional videos and try to address
| concerns regarding the magnetic properties. If you really think
| the findings are important you should try to have public
| communications with other scientists where you share as much
| information as possible.
|
| Too many people get caught up with playing politics and lose
| sight of the real goal, which is pushing humanity forward.
| guender wrote:
| [dead]
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(page generated 2023-07-27 23:01 UTC)