[HN Gopher] High school student discovers 1.5M potential new ast...
___________________________________________________________________
High school student discovers 1.5M potential new astronomical
objects
Author : mhb
Score : 101 points
Date : 2025-12-26 15:13 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| iwontberude wrote:
| Is this important? I see we have a model which has not found
| anything officially, has been validated by no one nor has the
| science reproduced.
| uolmir wrote:
| Several of the candidate variable objects are characterized in
| the results section of the paper. The model is also tested for
| effectiveness against synthetic data. It appears to be a useful
| method and the paper describes a plausible path for it to aid
| future discovery.
| denuoweb wrote:
| $10,000 to $20,000 in GPU costs over a couple months. I had $20
| per week in highschool. Benefit of being rich is you are awarded
| opportunities.
| andai wrote:
| Where is this number from?
| prodigycorp wrote:
| You triggered an old memory of mine in high school of when I
| ran for class president in senior year and campaign spending
| was capped at $100 dollars and someone else flagrantly violated
| campaign finance rules and spent at least a thousand dollars
| primarily distributing pencils that would go on to litter the
| campus' every corner.
| jihadjihad wrote:
| Did they win the election?
| prodigycorp wrote:
| Yes. It was a close friend who told me he wasn't running
| prior to the nomination deadline. I had done some strong
| analytics and figured I had great odds. Then I learned,
| from the dean, that he was running. He split my vote. I
| learned a lot about life from that experience lol.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| why would one throw away pencils?
| dylan604 wrote:
| Why would any one dump a load of tea in the bay?
| rr808 wrote:
| Most school students these days never have to write
| anything.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| From the paper [0]: "The computer used for this paper contains
| an NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 with 22 GB of VRAM, 200 GB of RAM,
| and a 32-core Xeon CPU, courtesy of Caltech."
|
| That GPU was first released in 2018, and can be had for ~$1500
| today. The computer as a whole sounds exactly in-line with what
| a lab would have as an old spare machine. The student is lucky
| for sure to have access to such an institution, but it's not
| like he had rich parents who casually handed him $10-$20k. Much
| more likely he got access to Caltech resources because his
| exceptional talent caused a professor to take interest in him:
|
| "I would like to acknowledge and thank deeply my mentor Davy
| (Dr. J. Davy Kirkpatrick) for introducing me to astronomy at
| IPAC and providing guidance throughout this project, aiding in
| data analysis and the collection of known objects for the test
| set."
|
| [0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ad7fe6
| why-o-why wrote:
| The post you were replying to is about privilege, then you
| defend with:
|
| "but it's not like he had rich parents who casually handed
| him $10-$20k. Much more likely he got access to Caltech
| resources because his exceptional talent caused a professor
| to take interest in him:"
|
| These two things are _effectively_ the same.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > The post you were replying to is about privilege
|
| The comment explicitly made a claim of $10K to $20K in GPU
| costs, which was unfounded and false.
|
| I'm tired of the hand-wringing over privilege any time
| someone young does something impressive. Access to a strong
| GPU wasn't the deciding factor that made this kid able to
| do this work. It could have been done on an average GPU at
| slower throughput.
| why-o-why wrote:
| >> I'm tired of the hand-wringing over privilege
|
| Your discomfort doesn't make privilege go away. The fact
| that he even could afford a GPU seems to go over your
| head.
|
| EDIT: Ok, so he didn't own a GPU and borrowed a PC from
| CalTec. That does not change the argument. On the one
| hand, I'm glad there is so much alignment on this issue,
| on the other hand its sad how hard people fight against
| privilege. I get it, for a long time I thought privilege
| was some whiny liberal thing. Through my decades I've
| seen over and over again the patterns of who wins and who
| loses, and privilege appears the same way bent spacetime
| makes gravity appear. People like the old me want to
| fight about how privilege/gravity is a myth. I'm terrible
| at arguing this, but I hope those of you fighting this
| concept acquire empathy and realize that not everyone has
| your advantages (and you may still be struggling too,
| that does not go away or get diminished, btw), and that
| the majority of that disadvantage is systemic, and
| intentional.
| tzs wrote:
| He used a Caltech computer.
| why-o-why wrote:
| OK, so wealth adjacency. My oversight doesn't change the
| argument.
| afro88 wrote:
| This thread had me a bit confused, then I realised the
| discrepancy. Your objective isn't to label the high
| school kid as privileged to remove respect for his work.
| It is to highlight the privilege to others that don't
| have the same privilege, who may see this as what success
| looks like, so the discouragement of not being able to do
| it (no access to GPUs) isn't attributed to a lack of
| their own ability or intelligence but something outside
| their control (privilege).
| bethekidyouwant wrote:
| The computer used for this paper contains an NVIDIA
| Quadro RTX 6000 with 22 GB of VRAM, 200 GB of RAM, and a
| 32-core Xeon CPU, courtesy of Caltech
| why-o-why wrote:
| OK, so wealth adjacency. My oversight doesn't change the
| argument.
| Empact wrote:
| If you want to believe those things are unattainable, you
| can, but just remember that Steve Jobs got an internship at
| HP at the age of 12 by calling the founder on the
| telephone. Literally anyone could have done that.
|
| These opportunities come to those who seek them.
| why-o-why wrote:
| This completely ignores reality. Jobs was a one-in-a-
| billion. To pretend privilege doesn't exist by invoking
| near mythological probabilities perpetuates it.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| To get the internship Jobs had to know about HP, and to
| live close enough to HP - in a relatively privileged part
| of the country - to make it a possibility.
|
| Compared to Rest of US, never mind Rest of World, only a
| _tiny_ percentage of twelve year olds had those two
| opportunities.
| cooper_ganglia wrote:
| Being handed things because your parents have money VS
| being handed things because you've prepared yourself for
| the opportunity couldn't be _more_ different.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >because you've prepared yourself for the opportunity
|
| Hmm, so, there's a teenager that loves astronomy and is
| very clever but he lives in rural Indiana with some
| parents who neglect him.
|
| (Or any third-world country around the world; or even
| worse, a war ridden place).
|
| How do you suggest he should prepare for this kind of
| opportunity?
|
| I'm not detracting from his merit, but 99% of this
| outcome is due to being next door to Caltech and
| sympathetic to its faculty.
|
| You don't choose what you want, you choose what you can
| have.
| mothballed wrote:
| Learn to be a roofer, make bank (I paid my ~"uneducated"
| roofer like $5k for labor alone for ~48 hours of labor),
| buy rural Indiana land, build your own private
| observatory, enjoy doing your own research without the
| crushing burden of the academic grinder.
|
| Astronomy is one of those fields where amateurs make new
| discoveries quite frequently.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| You can't do private research because most astronomy is
| really data- and compute-heavy astrophysics. Optical
| searches are fun and everyone loves new comets, but comet
| hunting isn't academic science.
| why-o-why wrote:
| Being adjacent to wealth is a privilege. Zip code is a
| better predictor of a child's success than any other
| metric.
| mothballed wrote:
| Because that's the hard part. Any asshole can discover
| something new, that alone doesn't mean much. Rosalind
| Franklin discovered the structure of DNA, but that was
| the easy part and didn't even barely merit her being
| credited-- the hard part is being proximal or in the
| nexus of power and being able to get the views and looks
| onward to the world.
|
| There are a gazillions of children capable of discovering
| things. What's important is to be the child with the
| social proof to get it published or actually _keep_ the
| credit. That 's highly valuable because having powerful
| friends/family is what helps fund, support, and continue
| research. A nobody can safely be discarded, rob the
| credit, then use the powerful to keep funding your
| friends -- in fact this might be even better for
| "science."
|
| The whole point of getting a PhD is to rub robes with the
| upper crust, get the contacts, perform the slave labor
| for the powerful, and become enrobed with the social
| proofs. If you just want to discover things, you don't
| need academic credentials, but you can sleep soundly
| knowing the information will get out there you just have
| to give it to someone credentialed to take the credit.
| ecshafer wrote:
| Rosalind Franklins contrabutions are vastly overestimated
| in an effort to "correct the record". Her data was very
| valuable, but she didnt make the insights.
| sigwinch wrote:
| Are they the same as receiving $20,000 in AWS credits?
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| Nobody denies that someone like Matteo is extremely
| privileged to have been born in the wealthiest country in
| the world, attend one of the best public schools in that
| country, and therefore be exposed to a research program
| that connected him to the Caltech professor that made his
| work possible.
|
| That privilege may well be a _necessary condition_ towards
| being able to publish a paper that shows extreme
| computational sophistication for a high schooler (and
| indeed, IMO would be a middle-of-the-road graduate-level
| paper). But it 's certainly not a _sufficient condition_ ,
| as you seem to be implying when you say that blindly giving
| a kid $10-$20k is "effectively the same" as having Matteo's
| background. If you just handed $20k worth of GPUs to a rich
| dilettante child, they would not be able to achieve
| anything close to what Matteo accomplished.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| This isn't about individuals, it's about policy.
|
| The default narrative is "hard work and talent should be
| rewarded", but the reality is "hard work and talent are
| only rewarded in very unusual and strictly rationed
| circumstances, and most potential is wasted."
|
| The waste is caused by unexamined political friction.
| There _has_ to be a hierarchy of opportunity, because
| some kinds of people have to an easier time of it than
| other kinds of people.
|
| American capitalism makes a lot of noise about social
| mobility but does almost everything it can to prevent it
| in practice.
|
| Occasionally people still make it against the odds, but
| the point is _the odds are there for most of the
| population._ People who beat them rarely get the kind of
| media support this story offers.
| denuoweb wrote:
| The high school he goes to has a $50,000 yearly tuition.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| Please stop repeating this lie. He went to the public
| Pasadena High School.
| parpfish wrote:
| Maybe I'm cynical, but whenever I read about a high school kid
| making a science breakthrough I assume this is what happened
| (based partially on personal experience):
|
| - the lab PI has a friend who's kid needs to put together a
| college application
|
| - PI asks their postdoctoral to tee up a project for the kid.
|
| - kid does the last 2% of the project but gets all the credit
| while being unaware of how much background legwork was needed to
| get them there. Postdoc gets nothing.
| jeremyscanvic wrote:
| Do you have any evidence to back this up? I'm asking out of
| genuine curiosity
| parpfish wrote:
| Other than personal experience of having my PI tell me to
| hand over my own almost-done experiments to his friends kids?
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| This is how it works 99% of the time
|
| This is the standard for getting into an elite school. Just
| getting good grades and generic "activities" hasn't cut it
| for twenty years or more.
|
| They live in a completely different world from the rest of us
| and they hate us for it.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Admissions manipulation games are very common. Another tactic
| is for high school students to have their startup company
| "acquired" by their parents' friends company, where the
| acquisition price is some token amount in exchange for hiring
| the kid for an internship.
|
| It can be really hard to judge these situations without
| getting the person in a 1:1 interview. Some times you meet
| someone with an extraordinary high school claim who can talk
| your ear off with impressive detail and deep understanding.
| Other times you start talking to someone and realize they
| don't even understand their own topic beyond surface level
| understanding necessary for talking to a newspaper
| journalist.
|
| With a claim like this, I'd be looking for interviews or
| online discussions. Usually the young people who are actually
| accomplishing amazing things are super excited to talk to the
| world about it. If anyone can find this person engaging in
| online forums or posting about progress on the build up, that
| lend a lot of weight to the claim.
| synergy20 wrote:
| it went far beyond those 'research paper because I have a
| good dad' or 'I had a few startups and some even got
| acquired thanks to my dad's friend'. The math competitions
| hosted by MAA, the CS Olympiads called usaco,etc are all
| full of cheating these days for a better college
| application. People will do whatever it takes to cut in
| line now.
| Aurornis wrote:
| How are the Olympiads full of cheating? I only
| participated in one but there wasn't any room for
| cheating.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| They're not. For some odd reason, the comments on this
| post are full of bitter people who cannot possibly fathom
| that brilliant young people not only exist, but also
| achieve amazing things on their own merits.
| throw10920 wrote:
| > They're not.
|
| Evidence for this claim?
|
| > For some odd reason, the comments on this post are full
| of bitter people who cannot possibly fathom that
| brilliant young people not only exist, but also achieve
| amazing things on their own merits.
|
| As opposed to you, who's up and down the thread making
| unsubstantiated claims and engaging in emotional
| manipulation to try to discredit (without evidence, I
| might add) the idea that there's _any_ cheating or
| subversion going on whatsoever.
|
| The people you're responding to are making far better
| points than you are.
| synergy20 wrote:
| just google for 'maa math cheating', 'usaco
| cheating',etc. there are official statements somewhere
| that you can probably dig out too. people were selling
| the answers before the test for $5 on discord. my kids
| are taking these exams, and it saddens/discourages them
| so much as their classmates are bragging about those $5
| answers and got super high scores. it's a public scandal,
| just that the media paid no attentions, so far.
| SilverElfin wrote:
| This isn't evidence but this was a well known issue even in
| the 90s and 00s. If you were a judge at high school science
| fair competitions (or a parent kid for that matter) you could
| easily tell which projects were actually done by adults. The
| complexity of the project, the equipment it would need, and
| the displays would give it away.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Or, he goes to the polytechnic high school that's right next to
| Caltech (half a block from the astronomy building no less) and
| getting research experience there is much easier than a regular
| high school.
|
| Looks like he went to Pasadena High School though. When I did a
| bit of aerospace research at Caltech in high school all I did
| was cold email professors so any kid around here with some
| initiative and smarts can get connected.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| And indeed, that's exactly what happened [0]: the kid in the
| OP was in a rigorous research program for high schoolers,
| which connected their talents to PIs who could nurture and
| support them. GP shouldn't reactively tear down the success
| of exceptionally talented kids because of their own
| unfortunate n=1 life experience.
|
| [0] https://www.justinmath.com/math-academys-eurisko-
| sequence-5-...
| denuoweb wrote:
| $50,000 a year high school tuition can make anyone
| exceptionally talented
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| Pasadena High School, where Matteo went to school, is
| public.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| Not all high school educations are created equal - See
| Carmel High School (Carmel, IN), New Trier High School
| (Winnetka, IL), or any other High School in a densely
| high wealth area.
| mothballed wrote:
| Pasadena school district spends $28K / student for their
| total $390M expenditures across ~14k students in
| 2023-2024 school year. I would bet dollars to doughnuts
| it's $30k+ per high school student since they are more
| expensive.
| gammarator wrote:
| While Pasadena is a relatively wealthy city, historically
| there has been significant avoidance of its public
| schools by affluent residents:
| https://southerneducation.org/in-the-news/new-polling-
| data-f...
| cm2012 wrote:
| The data says this is not true. Quality of education has
| almost no effect on lifetime income outcomes when you
| control for initial test scores.
| csto12 wrote:
| Do you have a source on this? That's really interesting
| if true.
| cm2012 wrote:
| Sure. There are many studies but here is one.
|
| Will Dobbie & Roland Fryer (NBER)
|
| This study uses regression-discontinuity around exam
| cutoffs at Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, and Stuyvesant.
| It finds increased rigor of coursework but little impact
| on SAT scores, college enrollment, or college graduation,
| which are key predictors of lifetime earnings (and
| typically closely linked to earnings outcomes).
|
| https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w17286/w
| 172...
| Isamu wrote:
| The criticism is of the spin in these articles. The
| experience these kids get is great, it should happen more.
| The articles always spin to get your attention, and the
| subject matter is fascinating, but it can be presented with
| less spin.
|
| And frankly any kid deserves praise for doing the
| unglamorous work that this takes. Very few can be arsed to
| put up with the extra work that it takes to do anything
| worthwhile, we are a nation getting lazier every day.
| antonvs wrote:
| > exceptionally talented kids
|
| Good euphemism for wealthy parents
| evan_ wrote:
| My assumption is always, a bright high school student has an
| impressive science fair project, but science reporting is
| terrible and misinterprets it as something more than it is.
|
| (Also: "Kid outsmarts stuffy professionals" is an evergreen
| journalistic subject, and don't dismiss the political angle of
| sowing distrust in "establishment" scientists in favor of a
| younger person using AI)
|
| Not that young people can't do big things but it's probably got
| less rigor than a graduate-level project.
|
| Don't get me wrong, this is a really cool idea and it sounds
| like he did a great job. I don't want to be unjustly
| dismissive. These stories come up all the time and they usually
| don't amount to a whole lot- like most research.
| parpfish wrote:
| yeah, the hard part about this issue is that the kids that do
| the project _are_ generally super smart. this situation ends
| up hurting three groups:
|
| - postdocs that are in a precarious career position are being
| forced to give up a bunch of work "for free" that they cant
| put on their CV
|
| - the bright kid is often given a skewed perception about
| what working in science is like and they will be
| disillusioned when the handholding stops and they have super-
| high expectations placed on them
|
| - depending on the how the press frames it, the public either
| gets a story that's anti-intellectual "never trust the
| experts" OR some feel-good fluff about some savior-savant on
| the horizon. neither is useful science reporting but good for
| clicks.
| mothballed wrote:
| I would certainly believe this _could_ be the case for this or
| the kind of science work that would be good for an application.
| Including this field.
|
| There are of course probably fields where there is ~no grant
| money, thus barely any research. Einstein noted we only know
| .001% of what there is to note of the universe, and even then
| he was probably embellishing in the favor of knowledge.
|
| I would also expect by the time you are a postdoc you are
| totally indoctrinated in your field in a way a high school
| student would not be. Standing on the shoulder of giants might
| not always be an advantage, if the giants have been whispering
| in your ear what to look at, whispering in your ear what they
| think is true, whispering in your ear what they think reality
| is, and all your fellows have been listening to whispers from
| similar giants.
| polybius89 wrote:
| Yeah, it seems like so:
|
| "I would like to acknowledge and thank deeply my mentor Davy
| (Dr. J. Davy Kirkpatrick) for introducing me to astronomy at
| IPAC and providing guidance throughout this project, aiding in
| data analysis and the collection of known objects for the test
| set."
|
| https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ad7fe6
| gammarator wrote:
| Sounds like Dr. Kirkpatrick should have been a coauthor.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Sadly, I thought the same... Pasadena? Hmmm...
|
| Regardless of whether there is something rotten here, I think
| they should in fact focus on the science and not the person
| behind the science. And that gives the young person some cover
| too.
|
| The article says that _The Astronomical Journal_ did just that:
| talked about the discovery without focusing on the age of the
| author. I think I prefer that.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Totally agree. Most careers in Science are nepo since day zero.
| isthatafact wrote:
| I am no expert, and I am not sure what is meant by "nepo",
| but that seems like a wild mischaracterization or
| exaggeration.
|
| Is there evidence?
|
| It seems obvious that parents can increase or decrease the
| odds of someone starting a career in an "elite" field
| requiring advanced education like "Science", but I interpret
| your comment as suggesting that most scientists got their job
| by means of daddy donating to a university or some other
| silly fantasy.
| thelastgallon wrote:
| This is spot on! Mostly, kids do less than nothing, their
| parents do the rest!
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Better than the postdoc I knew who was driving his PI's kids to
| football practice every day.
| neilv wrote:
| This is one of the lesser bad-professor archetypes (the
| personal errand slaver) that surprisingly exists in real
| life. And much worse archetypes also exist and persist.
|
| Like many professors behaving badly, you'd think they'd get
| exposed and corrected. But grad students and postdocs (in a
| position to know what's going on) don't want to throw away
| their careers. They need the recommendations, they need to
| not be seen as damaged goods from a bad advisor, and they
| need to not have sketchy university administrators getting
| rid of the messenger. And if admin assistants notice, they
| probably need the job, especially if their kid is getting a
| tuition deal because the parent works at the university. To a
| bad professor, the environment is like a heartless business,
| only less accountable.
|
| When a friend was telling me about this brand new grad
| student, who'd be working with professor X, I said "Oh,
| no..." and that X was bad to students (which I knew from one
| of their students). Friend, who was from a prominent academic
| lineage, immediately responded crossly, that I shouldn't say
| such things, hurting people's reputations. Soon after, friend
| came back and apologized, that I had been right, and the
| student realized their terrible career move, getting that
| advisor. Friend later connected some prospective student to
| me, to warn them about a different bad (worse) professor in
| the whisper network.
|
| But universities have terrible institutional memories, with
| students always leaving. So a bad professor tends to persist.
|
| Though, occasionally, you'll hear of a bad professor from the
| whisper network leaving their job, without explanation. So
| presumably a wronged student or staff finally sued.
| leogao wrote:
| this kind of cynicism hurts young people who actually do good
| work on their own though.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Grade inflation hurts the students who actually deserved 'A'
| grades.
|
| But if you are making consequential decisions (like admission
| or hiring) based on a metric or signal that's been gamed to
| death, then you have to be a realist.
| mmooss wrote:
| Whenever I see any front page OP I assume HN comments will dump
| on it, even one about a high schooler winning a science prize
| with a genuine scientific discovery. I hope you don't treat
| your own and your loved ones' news and accomplishments the same
| way.
|
| Congratulations Matteo Paz. You not only won the science prize,
| you got the Hacker News front page treatment.
| parpfish wrote:
| you're right. i'm clearly morally deficient because i've let
| my own (not at all idiosyncratic) personal experience color
| my opinions.
| alexpotato wrote:
| This is true of a lot of experiences in life though and isn't
| necessarily bad.
|
| e.g. let's take a corporate example:
|
| - New software is written to solve a problem
|
| - It kind of works. At least, well enough that it's less of a
| problem
|
| - An intern comes along and is told to make it better. They
| have nothing else to do so they give it their full attention
| for two months.
|
| - Software runs 5x faster. Intern gets hired for doing such
| great work
|
| Who should the credit for this? The person who originally
| solved the problem? or the intern who made it 5x faster?
|
| At some point, does it matter? The original writer probably got
| credit for solving the problem and the intern got hired.
| Basically, everyone got some kind of benefit.
|
| (This being HN, I am SURE there is going to be a debate about
| the above...)
| parpfish wrote:
| this might be bait, but i'll bite.
|
| this example isn't a great example for the academic situation
| given the way "getting credit" works and how important it is
| in academia. getting credit for your work in academia isn't
| just about ego, it's the currency you use to get and keep
| your job.
|
| imagine if in software land you had to periodically assemble
| a list of your lifetime accomplishments and you were getting
| stack-ranked against every other dev in existence. if your
| list is found lacking, you have to leave software engineering
| for a different career.
|
| when work gets moved from a postdoc or gradstudent to serve
| as a vanity project for a connected high-schooler (i'm not
| saying that that's what happened in this case, but it _is_
| something that happens), you 're hurting an early-career
| scientist that is actively contributing to the field in order
| to support a kid that "maybe someday" will start to
| contribute to the field.
| tejohnso wrote:
| Throw a $250,000 incentive into the mix and you're almost
| guaranteed to get less than honest work.
| psyklic wrote:
| Mentorships are simply how most junior scientists get started.
| Even in grad school, most students initially take on projects
| their advisors have pre-qualified as interesting.
|
| To make high school-level competitions more fair, we should
| likely prioritize access to researchers for all smart, hard-
| working high schoolers rather than only those who are nearby a
| university or have wealthy parents.
| mathattack wrote:
| My assumption is most Science Fairs are based on Dad and Mom's
| contribution, and things like this are filler for elite
| university applications.
|
| The one thing that suggests this might be legit is that
| Pasadena has an elite Math High School.
| https://www.mathacademy.us/
|
| If a college senior could pull it off, perhaps a properly
| educated high school junior could too.
| clickety_clack wrote:
| I live in a town with a few big pharmaceutical Co.s, and the
| local high school has several national science fair prizes
| (more than one would be very unlikely). All the kids that won
| prizes had parents working in R&D at those Co.s.
| firefax wrote:
| Or maybe it's the other way around?
|
| I was an undergrad, not in high school, but I basically
| designed and ran a project that led to a major publication that
| a useless postdoc who was foisted onto the lab leader for
| political reasons took credit for an "kindly" gave me last
| author on.
|
| Later, when I was in my own PhD, my adviser wouldn't let me
| continue MY OWN RESEARCH because it might "look like" I was
| stealing his work, so I had to invent a different thesis topic.
|
| The above was in CS, this is more STEM BTW -- it's perfectly
| possible to develop a new computational technique to "discover"
| 1.5m new interesting things in an existing data set -- it's
| impressive, but it's not on par with say, a botanist cataloging
| 1.5 million new flowers.
| rr808 wrote:
| I'm going through this now, a few years ago I heard that
| "research" with college professors was key - I ignored it
| because I thought it was performative and unlikely that any
| decent professor would want to waste their time. The kids that
| had their EDs accepted to Ivys at my daughter's school all did
| research with "professors" that were parents or friends of
| parents. It explains a lot of what I see of our graduates from
| "top" universities we hire from.
| andai wrote:
| Here is the paper
|
| https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ad7fe6
| RestartKernel wrote:
| Very good work for a high schooler, but explaining
| backpropagation and cross entropy loss is typical of ML paper-
| mill, though the feature extractor is interesting. These
| results really call for more domain-specific analysis to reach
| any significance deserving of headlines.
| theunixbeard wrote:
| More behind-the-scenes info could be provided by HN's
| @JustinSkycak:
|
| * https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=JustinSkycak
|
| Here's a blog post of his talking about Matteo among other
| things:
|
| * https://www.justinmath.com/math-academys-eurisko-sequence-5-...
| why-o-why wrote:
| The article didn't say how accurate the predictions were. Too
| bad, that's the important part.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Because there is no admitting what was found were predictions.
| Millions of entities, that will take years to verify the data.
|
| The interview is funny: when the winner was asked how he did
| it: I took that NASA database, and made the computer think...
|
| No more concrete. Oh yes they said AI and infrared, he even
| used infrared.
| tzs wrote:
| The second paragraph of the article contains a link straight
| to the paper, which is open access.
| moffkalast wrote:
| All they know is his gut says maybe.
| awacs wrote:
| I thought for a second the title was new Epstein files...
| tantalor wrote:
| > potential
|
| As in, not validated?
|
| How do we know this algorithm is any good?
| cramcgrab wrote:
| AI is great!
| throw27 wrote:
| American kids are super smart
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| I don't know if the comment really adds to the conversation at
| all, but surely the comment should just be "kids are super
| smart", if anything
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