391
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 689 posts.
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Feynman’s Breakthrough: Disregard Others
Feynman (just off centre) at Wangerooge in 1987 I started my career as a theoretical physicist, and in the late-80s I co-organised a specialist workshop on a small island, Wangerooge, off the coast…
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What Happens Next? Covid-19 Futures, Explained with Playable Simulations
an interactive guide
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My Left Kidney
...
395
LaTeX Coffee Stains (2009)
This package provides an essential feature to LaTeX that has been missing for too long. It adds a coffee stain to your documents. A lot of time can be saved by printing stains directly on the page rather than adding it manually.
396
Quantum computing bombshells that are not April Fools
For those of you who haven’t seen, there were actually two “bombshell” QC announcements this week. One, from Caltech, including friend-of-the-blog John Preskill, showed how to do quantum faul…
397
The Cuboid: A DIY air purifier that's better than a box fan
Designs for a quieter, more energy efficient purifier, and data proving it really works.
398
Graph Networks for Materials Exploration
We share the discovery of 2.2 million new crystals – equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge. We introduce Graph Networks for Materials Exploration (GNoME), our new deep learning tool that dramatically increases the speed and efficiency of discovery by predicting the stability of new materials.
399
How To Deconstruct Almost Anything (1993)
This is the story of one computer professional's explorations in the world of postmodern literary criticism. I'm a working software engineer, not a student nor an academic nor a person with any real background in the humanities. Consequently, I've approached the whole subject with a somewhat different frame of mind…
400
World map of the difference between solar and clock time
A better map of the difference between solar and standard time, and some trivia
401
Exploring the Supply Chain of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna Covid-19 Vaccines
Sections of this post were co-authored by Cornelia Scheitz. Noah Leidinger created a German translation. Piotr Kwapin created a Polish translation. Last updated on February 7, 2021. Bert Hubert’s excellent and widely shared article about Reverse Engineering the source code of the Pfizer-BioNTech SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine is…
402
Feynman’s Maze-Running Story
Richard Feynman recounts an amazing anecdote about philosophy of science; we trace it to a forgotten University of Michigan research programme into ‘floor cues’.
403
When His SR-71 Blackbird Disintegrated, This Pilot Free Fell from Space
During the early days of testing for the legendary SR-71 Blackbird there were some harrowing mishaps, the details of which have rarely come to light. On January 25, 1966, test pilot Bill Weaver and Lockheed flight test reconnaissance and navigation systems specialist Jim Zwayer experienced their plane vanishing around…
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We have surpassed 6 of the 9 planetary boundaries that sustain human life (2023)
The planetary boundaries framework highlights the rising risks from human pressure on nine critical global processes that regulate the stability and resilience of the Earth
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Project Silica proof-of-concept stores movie on quartz glass
Microsoft and Warner Brothers collaborate to store and retrieve the 1978 'Superman' movie on a piece of glass roughly the size of a drink coaster.
407
English Letter Frequency Counts: Mayzner Revisited
Here's what we can do with today's computing power (using publicly available data and the processing power of my own personal computer; I'm not relying on access to corporate computing power):
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On Hyperloop
Dr. Drang (And now it's all this)2013167 points203 commentscited by 6Society, Policy & Culture details
410
Everything Is Correlated
Anthology of sociology, statistical, or psychological papers discussing the observation that all real-world variables have non-zero correlations and the implications for statistical theory such as ‘null hypothesis testing’.
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Algernon's Law
Why most supplements fail: IQ improvement skepticism, Yudkowsky & Bostrom’s heuristics, nootropics
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The ABC conjecture has still not been proved
Five years ago, Cathy O’Neil laid out a perfectly cogent case for why the (at that point recent) claims by Shinichi Mochizuki should not (yet) be regarded as constituting a proof of the ABC conjecture. I have nothing further to add on the sociological aspects of mathematics discussed in that post, but I just wanted to…
413
Tire-related chemical responsible for salmon deaths in urban streams (2020)
A team led by researchers at UW Tacoma, UW and Washington State University Puyallup has discovered a chemical that kills coho salmon in urban streams before the
414
What's wrong with social science and how to fix it
Replication, citations, power, incentives, and more.
415
Regression to the mean is the main reason ineffective treatments appear to work
Jump to follow-up “Statistical regression to the mean predicts that patients selected for abnormalcy will, on the average, tend to improve. We argue that most improvements attributed to the p…
416
Clifford Algebra: A visual introduction (2014)
Clifford Algebra, a.k.a. Geometric Algebra, is a most extraordinary synergistic confluence of a diverse range of specialized mathematical fields, each with its own methods and formalisms, all of wh…
417
Where to hate daylight saving time and where to love it
Update: a newer version of this little project helps you make your complaints about daylight saving time—whether they’re for or against it—with clearer messages about whether keeping DST, abolishing it, or making it permanent would be best for your daylight preferences. Give it a whirl over at Observable.
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Time Travel (2006)
Last time we talked about free will, superintelligent predictors, and Dr. Evil planning to destroy the earth from his moon base. Today I'd like to talk about a more down-to-earth topic: time travel. The first point I have to make is one that Carl Sagan made: we're all time travelers—at the rate of one second per…
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What Gives Gold that Mellow Glow? (2006)
What Gives Gold that Mellow Glow?
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Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable
Some people claim nuclear fuel is inexhaustible and circular, others say we'll run out soon. We do the math. Turns out, it's roughly as inexhaustible as sunlight.