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Bicycle
Interactive article explaining the physics of a bicycle.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 21 posts.
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The Dunning-Kruger effect is autocorrelation
Do unskilled people actually underestimate their incompetence?
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Surprisingly Turing-Complete
A catalogue of software constructs, languages, or APIs which are unexpectedly Turing-complete; implications for security and reliability.
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Regex engine internals as a library
Over the last several years, I’ve rewritten Rust’s regex crate to enable better internal composition, and to make it easier to add optimizations while maintaining correctness. In the course of this rewrite I created a new crate, regex-automata , which exposes much of the regex crate internals as their own APIs for…
6
Is the reversal curse in LLMs real?
A recent paper The Reversal Curse points out an apparent failure in large large language models like GPT-4. From the abstract: We expose a surprising failure of generalization in auto-regressive large language models (LLMs). If a model is
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A mathematical formalization of dimensional analysis (2012)
Mathematicians study a variety of different mathematical structures, but perhaps the structures that are most commonly associated with mathematics are the number systems, such as the integers $late…
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The Dome: A simple violation of determinism in Newtonian mechanics (2005)
John D. Norton Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh PA 15260. Homepage: www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton This page is available at www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/goodies
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The largest number representable in 64 bits
A rewrite of this blog post with many new insights and updates appeared in Jan 2026
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Debunking NIST's calculation of the Kyber-512 security level
[Sidney Harris cartoon used with permission. Copyright holder: ScienceCartoonsPlus.com .]
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Beautiful branchless binary search
I read a blog post by Alex Muscar, “Beautiful Binary Search in D”. It describes a binary search called “Shar’s algorithm”. I’d never heard of it and it’s i…
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Let's try to understand AI monosemanticity
Inside every AI is a bigger AI, trying to get out
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California needs real math education, not gimmicks
A guest post by Armand Domalewski.
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Breaking RSA with a quantum computer?
A group of Chinese researchers have just published a paper claiming that they can—although they have not yet done so—break 2048-bit RSA. This is something to take seriously. It might not be correct, but it’s not obviously wrong. We have long known from Shor’s algorithm that factoring with a quantum computer is easy…
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Cargo Cult Quantum Factoring
Just days after we celebrated my wife’s 40th birthday, she came down with COVID, meaning she’s been isolating and I’ve been spending almost all my time dealing with our kids. But …
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GPT-4 gets a B on my quantum computing final exam
Update (April 14): On the suggestion of my TA Justin Yirka, I gave GPT-4 problem 2 from the final exam, along with its own answers and my and Justin’s grading comments, and asked it whether i…
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John Conway's FRACTRAN, a ridiculous, yet surprisingly deep language (2020)
On April 8, 2020, John Horton Conway developed symptoms of COVID-19. On April 11, 2020, he succumbed to the disease. 1 2 3 4
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How Many People? Ancient Demography
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2023121 points5 commentscited by 3History & Retro Computing details
One of the first questions anyone asks about past societies is, ‘how many people were there?’ It is one of those basic bits of information and generally speaking those of us who teach t…
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Avoiding visible texture repetition (2015)
Tutorials and articles of Inigo Quilez on computer graphics, fractals, math, art, demoscene, shaders and more.