frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

A laser pointer at 2B FPS [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4TdHrMi6do
137•thunderbong•1d ago

Comments

mjmas•1d ago
The view from one end of a laser going between two mirrors (timestamp 1:37) is a fairly good demonstration of the camera having to wait for light to get to it.
Neywiny•21h ago
I thought his method of multiplexing the single channel was very smart. I guess it's more common on 2 channel or high end 4 channel scopes to have a dedicated trigger input, which I've checked this one doesn't have. That said, there're digital inputs that could've been used. Presumably from whatever was controlling the laser.
dist-epoch•2h ago
Techniques like this are/were used to film nuclear explosions (but with a single explosion).
01HNNWZ0MV43FF•1h ago
Scanning a single pixel over an image? How does that work with an explosion? The laser pointer is reproducible
bob1029•1h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapatronic_camera
snitty•58m ago
But that bears no relation to what happened in the video.
masfuerte•49m ago
The rapatronic camera had an incredibly fast electronic shutter. To record a video they needed one camera per frame. Rather like "bullet time" in the movies. The technique in the youtube video is completely different.
fluoridation•33m ago
It's not completely different. I'd argue it's the exact opposite. Instead of using a single single-pixel camera to record video of a repeatable event, a sequence of regular film cameras captured photographs of an unrepeatable event.
throw327489•1h ago
Who detonated 2073600 bombs?
monster_truck•18m ago
They did the way more expensive version briefly mentioned towards the start of the video, having 12+ cameras with ridiculously fast shutters (as low as 10 nanoseconds) arranged to run in seqeunce.
jfengel•1h ago
Ah, two billion. The first several times I saw this it looked like "twenty eight", which didn't seem terribly interesting.
MostlyStable•1h ago
As I understand it, this is sort of simulating what it would be like to capture this, by recreating the laser pulse and capturing different phases of it each time, then assembling them; so what is represented in the final composite is not a single pulse of the laser beam.

Would an upgraded version of this that was actually capable of capturing the progress of a single laser pulse through the smoke be a way of getting around the one-way speed of light limitation [0]? It seems like if you could measure the pulse's propagation in one direction, and the other (as measured by when it scatters of the smoke at various positions in both directions), this seems like it would get around it?

But it's been a while since I read an explanation for why we have the one-way limitation in the first place, so I could be forgetting something.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-way_speed_of_light

snitty•1h ago
>As I understand it, this is sort of simulating what it would be like to capture this, by recreating the laser pulse and capturing different phases of it each time, then assembling them; so what is represented in the final composite is not a single pulse of the laser beam.

It is not different phases, but it is a composite! On his second channel he describes the process[0]. Basically, it's a photomultiplier tube (PMT) attached to a precise motion control rig and a 2B sample/second oscilloscope. So he ends up capturing the actual signal from the PMT over that timespan at a resolution of 2B samples/s, and then repeating the experiment for the next pixel over. Then after some DSP and mosaicing, you get the video.

>It seems like if you could measure the pulse's propagation in one direction, and the other (as measured by when it scatters of the smoke at various positions in both directions), this seems like it would get around it?

The point here isn't to measure the speed of light, and my general response when someone asks "can I get around physics with this trick" by answer is no. But I'd be lying if I said I totally understood your question.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KOFbvW2A-o

avidiax•1h ago
He did a good job on his setup, but I have to think that adding a spinning mirror would have made everything much faster and easier.

He could then capture an entire line quite quickly, and would only need a 1 dimensional janky mirror setup to handle the other axis. And his resolution in the rotating axis is limited only by how quickly he can pulse the laser.

Of course, his janky mirror setup could have been 2 off-the-shelf galvos, but I guess that isn't as much "content".

ahofmann•51m ago
But I think he does capture an entire line quite quickly. As I understood it, he “scans” a line of pixels in seconds.
kllrnohj•23m ago
I think a spinning mirror would make it a lot harder. He's only moving the mirror after the "animation" finishes. So it's capture video, step by 1 pixel, capture video, step by 1 pixel, capture video, etc... He's replaying the scene ~1 million times, for 1 million unique single pixel 2 billion fps videos.

Intel and AMD standardise ChkTag to bring Memory Safety to x86

https://community.intel.com/t5/Blogs/Tech-Innovation/open-intel/ChkTag-x86-Memory-Safety/post/172...
98•ashvardanian•6d ago•41 comments

Claude Code on the web

https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-code-on-the-web
313•adocomplete•5h ago•187 comments

You don't need Kafka: Building a message queue with Unix signals

https://leandronsp.com/articles/you-dont-need-kafka-building-a-message-queue-with-only-two-unix-s...
23•SchwKatze•1h ago•14 comments

BERT is just a single text diffusion step

https://nathan.rs/posts/roberta-diffusion/
330•nathan-barry•9h ago•82 comments

Production RAG: what I learned from processing 5M+ documents

https://blog.abdellatif.io/production-rag-processing-5m-documents
272•tifa2up•7h ago•73 comments

Alibaba Cloud says it cut Nvidia AI GPU use by 82% with new pooling system

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/alibaba-says-new-pooling-system-cut-nvi...
319•hd4•11h ago•215 comments

My trick for getting consistent classification from LLMs

https://verdik.substack.com/p/how-to-get-consistent-classification
61•frenchmajesty•1w ago•18 comments

Show HN: I created a cross-platform GUI for the JJ VCS (Git compatible)

https://judojj.com
50•bitpatch•8h ago•5 comments

A laser pointer at 2B FPS [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4TdHrMi6do
138•thunderbong•1d ago•16 comments

Today is when the Amazon brain drain sent AWS down the spout

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/20/aws_outage_amazon_brain_drain_corey_quinn/
189•raw_anon_1111•2h ago•74 comments

Code from MIT's 1986 SICP video lectures

https://github.com/felipap/sicp-code
74•felipap•3d ago•5 comments

x86-64 Playground – An online assembly editor and GDB-like debugger

https://x64.halb.it/
95•modinfo•5h ago•8 comments

TernFS – an exabyte scale, multi-region distributed filesystem

https://www.xtxmarkets.com/tech/2025-ternfs/#posix-shaped
83•kirlev•6h ago•8 comments

The scariest "user support" email I've ever received

https://www.devas.life/the-scariest-user-support-email-ive-ever-received/
117•hervic•5d ago•80 comments

AWS Multiple Services Down in us-east-1

https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status?ts=20251020
1544•kondro•16h ago•1764 comments

How to stop Linux threads cleanly

https://mazzo.li/posts/stopping-linux-threads.html
160•signa11•5d ago•57 comments

Atomic-Scale Protein Filters

https://press.asimov.com/articles/filters
5•mailyk•5d ago•0 comments

Optical diffraction patterns made with a MOPA laser engraving machine [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsGHr7dXLuI
104•emsign•6d ago•17 comments

Art Must Act

https://aeon.co/essays/harold-rosenberg-exhorted-artists-to-take-action-and-resist-cliche
13•tintinnabula•3d ago•0 comments

Postman which I thought worked locally on my computer, is down

https://status.postman.com
140•helloguillecl•8h ago•68 comments

J.P. Morgan's OpenAI loan is strange

https://marketunpack.com/j-p-morgans-openai-loan-is-strange/
186•vrnvu•4h ago•121 comments

Space Elevator

https://neal.fun/space-elevator/
1452•kaonwarb•19h ago•331 comments

iOS 26.1 lets users control Liquid Glass transparency

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/10/20/ios-26-1-liquid-glass-toggle/
130•dabinat•4h ago•105 comments

Servo v0.0.1

https://github.com/servo/servo
450•undeveloper•10h ago•137 comments

The longest baseball game took 33 innings to win

https://www.mlb.com/news/the-longest-professional-baseball-game-ever-played
33•mooreds•5d ago•52 comments

Docker Systems Status: Full Service Disruption

https://www.dockerstatus.com/pages/incident/533c6539221ae15e3f000031/68f5e1c741c825463df7486c
322•l2dy•16h ago•123 comments

DeepSeek OCR

https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-OCR
849•pierre•17h ago•219 comments

Show HN: Playwright Skill for Claude Code – Less context than playwright-MCP

https://github.com/lackeyjb/playwright-skill
134•syntax-sherlock•11h ago•40 comments

When a stadium adds AI to everything, it's worse experience for everyone

https://a.wholelottanothing.org/bmo-stadium-in-la-added-ai-to-everything-and-what-they-got-was-a-...
97•wawayanda•4h ago•49 comments

Show HN: EloqDoc: MongoDB-compatible doc DB with object storage as first citizen

https://github.com/eloqdata/eloqdoc
30•iamlintaoz•1d ago•18 comments