I realize this is off topic, but why do people use Claude of all models to write these, when its style is so obvious and so grating? I just immediately hit Back on the first Claudism.
ccamrobertson 3 hours ago [-]
While I pine for a dark sky, it makes sense that these operations should move in the same way century old optical telescopes in cities are no longer used for cutting edge science.
The far side of the moon seems like an increasingly viable option.
isodev 50 minutes ago [-]
Or Space Karen can fix his space junk...
Maybe even start paying for the toxic waste he is landing when his junk continuously fails to stay up and re-enters the atmosphere.
cozzyd 2 hours ago [-]
Just wait until wireless networks on the moon ruin that too.
dylan604 2 hours ago [-]
You do realize that the far side of the moon is in direct sunlight for 2 weeks, right?
stackghost 1 hours ago [-]
It’s also in darkness for 2 weeks. Terrestrial radio telescopes experience sunlight too. That would seem to be a solved problem.
dylan604 1 hours ago [-]
and the moon is over 200°F in that sunlight.
ffsm8 12 minutes ago [-]
There is no atmosphere to speak of, so only if directly exposed. Hence that's a solvable issue.
The whole thing is incredibly expensive though, while it may be doable with current technology, the amount of money they'd have to set aside may be a hard sell for the miniscule potential of this research - at least from the lens of 2026... So the original position of the article makes sense, it may become functionally impossible, even if technically possible
robryan 3 hours ago [-]
> Algorithmic mitigation is being explored, but scientists describe it as “embryonic” — potentially demanding computing power that rivals the science processing itself.
It sounds like this would work? Just be more costly, at least in the short term.
> Engineering fixes are the real answer
What is the fix and tradeoff? The article doesn't seem to cover it at all.
ahepp 2 hours ago [-]
> The accidental static bleeding from onboard hardware, coupling through satellite structures and radiating across frequencies nobody authorized.
> The numbers tell the story bluntly:
I wouldn't waste too much compute trying to parse it, lots of LLM tells in the article. Pangram puts it at 100% AI.
RockRobotRock 3 hours ago [-]
maybe Internet for people on earth matters more than astronomy
defrost 3 hours ago [-]
We had that before Starlink flooded the radio quiet zones with leakage.
testing22321 3 minutes ago [-]
You mean privileged people in developed countries had it. Billions of people did not.
I’ve seen the first hand impact of starlink in communities that before had dialup as the fastest option from Australia to Tunisia to remote arctic Canada.
Medical stuff, school, talking to loved ones.
bcraven 3 hours ago [-]
Were that the case, there would have been nobody buying Starlink.
As they are, I think you are wrong.
lokar 30 minutes ago [-]
My neighborhood has both cable and fiber, both >= 1Gbps, fairly cheap
My neighbor has starlink. I assume because they are MAGA.
chaostheory 3 hours ago [-]
Not everyone lives within a metro that has good infrastructure. This is even more true in developing countries.
dghlsakjg 2 hours ago [-]
More tech people need to go places.
I was living in the eastern Caribbean ten years ago (a place that is not particularly poor), and the number of web services that could not handle a slow or unreliable connection was kind of shocking. Netflix was actually pretty impressive, they were fine to about 500kb/s with a lot of dropped packets. Below that, they were slow, but by no means unreliable. Most other sites would shit the bed on a similar connection.
Starlink has been an absolute godsend for my friends that are still down there.
cozzyd 3 hours ago [-]
These are either incidental or unauthorized transmissions. Not the Ku band downlink to terminals.
sh-run 3 hours ago [-]
I have such a love hate relationship with the tech. On one hand, I live on the edge of the mountains and can get away while on-call, set up my starlink and still be within SLAs if I got paged while out of service (weekend pages are fairly rare). On the other hand, I'm an amateur astronomer, for visual astro, it's not a huge deal, but I see how it could be for astrophotography (streaks) and obviously it's a problem for radio.
stackghost 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
cwillu 3 hours ago [-]
“Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.” --https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
stackghost 2 hours ago [-]
“Assume good faith” is no longer feasible. There are so many people/probably bots commenting here with obvious agendas.
Everyone complains about Reddit and twitter and whatever else being heavily astroturfed, but we’re supposed to think HN is somehow immune?
RockRobotRock 2 hours ago [-]
I’m a human that just so happens to disagree with you. I don’t like Elon either, but what I dislike more is that it’s impossible to talk about any of his companies without people like you assuming my motives.
stackghost 2 hours ago [-]
What precisely are your motives, then?
The umpteenth example of Musk companies behaving poorly and here you come to suggest that we can’t let pesky things like science stand in the way of “the internet”. As if Starlink services is synonymous with the internet itself. The implication is clear, to me at least.
RockRobotRock 1 hours ago [-]
Precise motives? I don’t know, I don’t think I have any. I don’t use starlink myself or have a Tesla or invest in any of his companies. Feels silly to disclaim that, but there you go.
Having used starlink before on a plane and on land, it’s fast and seems far superior to previous generations of satellite internet. I’m earnestly asking if creating problems for astronomers is outweighed by giving more people access to the internet. Not just giving them “access”, but giving them very fast and low latency access.
Hizonner 3 hours ago [-]
That might be dispositive if we didn't already have almost everybody on Earth wired up without using satellites.
asdfasgasdgasdg 3 hours ago [-]
The fact that so many people are paying for starlink suggests that it is adding something important that was missing before.
fluidcruft 3 hours ago [-]
Streaming video on airplane flights?
db48x 3 hours ago [-]
Most of Starlink’s customers are simply rural people who want Internet access at decent speeds. There are wide swathes of the US where Starlink’s best competition is measured in kilobytes per second.
defrost 3 hours ago [-]
Seems like a case for the US having better fibre deployment than it does for leaking interference from unshielded poorly made tin cans.
wbl 1 hours ago [-]
Fibre rolls in a dense city have different economics from somewhere with just a few people per square mile.
defrost 58 minutes ago [-]
and yet Western Australia, 3x size of Texas with less than a million people in 1980 had a telephone network that covered the population.
The "sums are different for rural V urban" doesn't make leaky tin cans a better solution over fibre to population, particularly given the downsides.
db48x 30 minutes ago [-]
Pretty sure we achieved that level of coverage here in the US a decade or more earlier than that. A lot of those same rural customers still rely on the telephone system for Internet access. They might be able to get DSL now, but the speeds are going to be low; often just a few hundred kilobits per second.
defrost 15 minutes ago [-]
So pull modern fibre; as should be done.
gordonhart 2 hours ago [-]
~80% of Starlink customers are not in the US.
defrost 57 minutes ago [-]
That'd be a point to make to the GP db48x
db48x 25 minutes ago [-]
No, I mean globally most of their customers are rural. Starlink is limited primarily by customer density rather than by absolute numbers. They can provide service to just so many people per square mile before the speed drops below the customer’s tolerance. Most of the square miles in the world are rural, therefore most of the customers are as well.
Plus cities have Starlink’s best competition. Starlink is amazing but FTTH is even better. If you can get FTTH at all then you probably won’t even consider Starlink. Nor should you.
sippingabonedry 2 hours ago [-]
Got a source for that?
Because there's entire continents of people who think it's the most ridiculous statement they've ever read on this site (which they can only access because of Starlink).
spdustin 4 hours ago [-]
I just have to say: I _hate_ with a white-hot fury the growing usage of html-load and error-report dot com bullshit on these sites. I block those domains for gratuitous ad-serving, and sites just cycle a modal error now.
(I know, I could disable JavaScript everywhere and enable it on a site-by-site basis. Maybe that time has come.)
bix6 4 hours ago [-]
I’ve got JavaScript disabled and no websites work.
dmix 3 hours ago [-]
And nothing was lost
4 hours ago [-]
electric_mayhem 4 hours ago [-]
That’s a mighty nice field of study you have there. It would be a shame if something happened to it
db48x 3 hours ago [-]
What I want to know is why astronomers are bitching about Starlink instead of capitalizing on the vastly reduced launch costs it brought about. Falcon 9 has been launching satellites for anyone who asks for a decade now. Where is Harvard’s space telescope? Last I heard they have a 50 billion dollar endowment. They could easily splash out on a space telescope for a fraction of that. James Webb and GAIA are amazing, but we could have a whole networked constellation of space telescopes by now if the universities had been on the ball.
Dracophoenix 2 hours ago [-]
An endowment isn't free money and launching a telescope into space remains a costlier venture than plopping a few arrays on a mountain range like Mauna Kea or the Chilean Andes. Contrary to your imagination, radio telescopes aren't that cheap either. The Smithsonian and NASA fund most of the construction, operation, and maintenance of Harvard's telescopes rather than the university. Suffice it to say, it's unlikely an academic institution will find an economically viable route to launching space telescopes any earlier than twenty years from now.
db48x 44 minutes ago [-]
Sure, sure. The endowment generates revenue which is then spent on stuff. Harvard spends billions every year on stuff. A small slice of that spending over the last decade could have gotten them a huge scientific and prestige boon: the first major private telescope in space. (Cubesats don’t count.)
Government subsidies might explain it though. Why should Harvard spend their own money when they can spend mine?
pclmulqdq 28 minutes ago [-]
Cubesats can’t take very good pictures. You need a big mirror to get really clear imagery and you can’t cram one of those in a cubesat. Space telescopes are by nature massive, heavy satellites unless they aren’t intended to look very far or see very much. The other option is to cheaply build something absolutely massive on Earth.
defrost 3 hours ago [-]
Ground constellations (eg: SKA in radio astronomy) are still vastly cheaper than orbiting arrays, also easier wrt incremental upgrade via physical visits, etc.
db48x 40 minutes ago [-]
Upgrades are overrated. Stick your telescope in sun–synchronous orbit and leave it there. Launch a better one every year or three. After a few launches your undergrads will still be excited to use that first telescope, your PhD students will use the next several, and your faculty will all be drooling over the latest.
Upgrades don’t increase capacity.
Oh, and we’ve got universities spending billions of taxpayer money to carve up mountains in Peru to build telescopes on top. Those are not cheaper than space telescopes would be.
defrost 17 minutes ago [-]
Again: Radio astronomy.
> universities spending billions of taxpayer money to carve up mountains in Peru to build telescopes on top
Which university and telescope are you talking about?
> Those are not cheaper than space telescopes would be.
In general, they are - take a ground based telescopes costs, now harden it for space (extra cost), now "do the right stuff" to ensure it will work in isolation (more cost), and now package it it and launch it (more cost again).
Rendered at 05:40:39 GMT+0000 (UTC) with Wasmer Edge.
The far side of the moon seems like an increasingly viable option.
Maybe even start paying for the toxic waste he is landing when his junk continuously fails to stay up and re-enters the atmosphere.
The whole thing is incredibly expensive though, while it may be doable with current technology, the amount of money they'd have to set aside may be a hard sell for the miniscule potential of this research - at least from the lens of 2026... So the original position of the article makes sense, it may become functionally impossible, even if technically possible
It sounds like this would work? Just be more costly, at least in the short term.
> Engineering fixes are the real answer
What is the fix and tradeoff? The article doesn't seem to cover it at all.
> The numbers tell the story bluntly:
I wouldn't waste too much compute trying to parse it, lots of LLM tells in the article. Pangram puts it at 100% AI.
I’ve seen the first hand impact of starlink in communities that before had dialup as the fastest option from Australia to Tunisia to remote arctic Canada.
Medical stuff, school, talking to loved ones.
As they are, I think you are wrong.
My neighbor has starlink. I assume because they are MAGA.
I was living in the eastern Caribbean ten years ago (a place that is not particularly poor), and the number of web services that could not handle a slow or unreliable connection was kind of shocking. Netflix was actually pretty impressive, they were fine to about 500kb/s with a lot of dropped packets. Below that, they were slow, but by no means unreliable. Most other sites would shit the bed on a similar connection.
Starlink has been an absolute godsend for my friends that are still down there.
Everyone complains about Reddit and twitter and whatever else being heavily astroturfed, but we’re supposed to think HN is somehow immune?
The umpteenth example of Musk companies behaving poorly and here you come to suggest that we can’t let pesky things like science stand in the way of “the internet”. As if Starlink services is synonymous with the internet itself. The implication is clear, to me at least.
Having used starlink before on a plane and on land, it’s fast and seems far superior to previous generations of satellite internet. I’m earnestly asking if creating problems for astronomers is outweighed by giving more people access to the internet. Not just giving them “access”, but giving them very fast and low latency access.
The "sums are different for rural V urban" doesn't make leaky tin cans a better solution over fibre to population, particularly given the downsides.
Plus cities have Starlink’s best competition. Starlink is amazing but FTTH is even better. If you can get FTTH at all then you probably won’t even consider Starlink. Nor should you.
Because there's entire continents of people who think it's the most ridiculous statement they've ever read on this site (which they can only access because of Starlink).
(I know, I could disable JavaScript everywhere and enable it on a site-by-site basis. Maybe that time has come.)
Government subsidies might explain it though. Why should Harvard spend their own money when they can spend mine?
Upgrades don’t increase capacity.
Oh, and we’ve got universities spending billions of taxpayer money to carve up mountains in Peru to build telescopes on top. Those are not cheaper than space telescopes would be.
> universities spending billions of taxpayer money to carve up mountains in Peru to build telescopes on top
Which university and telescope are you talking about?
> Those are not cheaper than space telescopes would be.
In general, they are - take a ground based telescopes costs, now harden it for space (extra cost), now "do the right stuff" to ensure it will work in isolation (more cost), and now package it it and launch it (more cost again).