> NASA and ESA do have this kind of program, where they publish data and encourage people to help.

He helped to sift through published data, found something, then shared it.

I really struggle to find any fault here. He wasn't logged into a portal that hasn't yet been announced? What?

Is it your view that publishing on "the internet" rather than a NASA portal is playing alone and distinct from the common effort?

This is a quote from the Reddit post:

"TESS comes back to this part of the sky in November. I submitted an observing proposal asking it to record this star every 2 minutes while it's there. It was approved. Program #100. "

Would be cool to re-launch a kind of SETI@Home where locally running models (and OAI/anthropic accounts) could participate with their agents (acting as sub-agents) to do research during the night. I think there is something already about renting local GPU time out, but for profit. Lots of security issues etc with this. But conceptually it would be nice to be able to contribute to space research that way.

> Last month I was going through data from NASA's TESS telescope

Literally the first line of the post.

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Love this!

I've been fascinated by how the Dutch and British East India companies operated.

Curious to take a look at this dataset.

Can Claude Code find aliens too ? Maybe Anthropic needs to make a Claude Extraterrestrial Search Product.

We'll probably have vibe intergalactic travel before Elder Scrolls 6 releases.

We got adobe suite in Rust vibe coded before GTA6 as well.

https://getartcraft.com/apps

Friend sent me this one, kinda glad people are learning what I learned with Claude 4.6… you can build anything at this point.

Because it is, with claudisms, periods in headers, and everything.

You are absolutely right!

We'll send Claude to settle there

Two economists pass by a $100 bill walking down the street. After a while, one asks the other if it was a $100 bill what they just walked by before.

The other answers: "Of course not, someone would haved picked it up already if it were"

Some times low hanging fruit is so low hanging that people don't bother to look for it as it's "obvious" someone else would had picked it already.

Visual sky survey telescopes can produce hundreds of terabytes of data per night they operate. Radio telescope can produce tens of petabytes per night. The SKA-Low telescope could theoretically produce 9 exabytes per night.

To put that in perspective, the total daily internet traffic ranges between 25-35 exabytes per day. If you fraction that to the ten hours a telescope would operate SKA-Low could double the amount of data transmitted globally on the web while it's recording

There are several stars in the sky.

One of the reddit comments from someone in the field says this signal is right at the edge of a noise threshold for existing models in use by academics.

I suppose you have to set a cutoff somewhere.

Maybe skilled work within other fields is more difficult than we imagine based on our ignorance?

The short answer is that there are a lot of stars and even more data.

When I last did astrophysics research half a decade ago (as an undergrad) the workflow for doing research boiled down to writing pipelines to clean the data and then have scripts to find interesting candidates and analyse them automatically. It was necessary to filter stuff to reduce false positives, so it's possible this candidate was just missed by such scripts.

It's also possible this star is in some PhD student's dataset and they just haven't published yet. Astrophysics papers in this vein usually focus on techniques for classification and data science so you'd expect to have at least dozens if not hundreds to thousands of interesting stellar objects before you have something worth publishing unless it was some truly novel technique. A paper just saying "we found an exoplanet" isn't particularly interesting these days, as it turns out there are a lot of them.

(I haven't looked at the data and I'm sure my skills have atrophied by now anyway, sadly.)

More power to the guy who did this (astrophysics is probably the most hobbyist-friendly science since a lot of the data is public and the only lab equipment you need is a laptop) but I suspect "ordinary" folks are far more impressed by this than astrophysics folks. A decade or two ago exoplanets were still thought to be very rare but we've since figured out they are quite common and have moved on to cataloguing them.

Doing a septillion (1e24) frequency analysis takes a measurable amount of time.

you don't know half of it: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/reddit-will-block-ol...

I recommend using redlib to view links now that they gate old.reddit.com behind an account:

https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib-instances/blob/main/ins...

It's still working for me in Chrome on Windows.

I never used old reddit when it was new. I sometimes end up on it from HN links. What is the difference, besides the UI?

To be clear: this is a genuine question and not an attempt to bait a flamewar. I honestly have no idea what the matter is. I have deliberately tried to avoid all social media other than HN for a very long time.

HN Headline: "My LLM told me it had found Planet Nine. Then I realized it had just found Pluto."

Claire maybe?

Claudina

Hope not.

Sounds about right.

"Vibe-turfing"?

Karpathy mentioned sometime in 2024/25 in a tweey that we should send LLM weights engraved on the next one.

Dunno the intelligence of the idea. It would give aliens the wrong impression because such an LLM would have very basic data about our race(e.g. a curated set of wikipedia)

Do you have a source, and also so what? This could have just as easily been codex or any other harness.

Did you read the post? This really isn't how this person went about this project at all.

Like NASA?

Agree on the need for verification, but that is not what peer review does. It would take an independent investigation.

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From the discussion:

> even got NASA to point a telescope at it for confirmation

with a proper stats harness the false positive rate can be brought well down to acceptable levels

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If you can set the criteria for testing that a human would also use, then any llm can do the job.

What is uncool is how people are using cloud based AI and their universities are not providing self hosted models that keep data within the university. Cloud AI is useless due to it being no different than publishing everything you do publicly.

It's interesting that a few months ago your sentiment would have been upvoted. I've noticed recently that things seem to be flipping around. Sadly, I think it's inevitable that people will accept a form of communication that consists of people trading slop. Even worse, the author lies about using AI for the writeup in the comments.

'Hide one year. The other two predict its dip.'

I DESPISE this kind of slop prose

I'm agreeing still, imho it's important to let people know they're consuming slop (even if you "commissioned" or "reviewed" it)

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Too bad LLMs did not learn imposter syndrome

Why? We have been allowing technology to progress us for decades. Why stop now?

We're coming back around to an era of the Citizen Scientist.