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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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GPT-4 and professional benchmarks: the wrong answer to the wrong question
OpenAI may have tested on the training data. Besides, human benchmarks are meaningless for bots.
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Wildfire restored a Yosemite watershed
Half a century of allowing lightning fires to burn in Yosemite’s Illilouette Creek Basin has recreated a lost forest ecosystem that is far more resilient to the impacts of drought, wildfire and climate change
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Color blindness
Color blindness is an inaccurate term. Most color-blind people can see color, they just don't see the same colors as everyone else. There ha...
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Jupyter, Mathematica, and the Future of the Research Paper
Economist. Policy Entrepreneur. Geek. Co-recipient of the 2018 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. University Professor at NYU. Focused on urbanization; cooperation at scale of millions and billions; science; technology; economic development; long-term growth; code as language.
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DNA seen through the eyes of a coder
Updates: 12th of September 2021: I’m writing a book on DNA! If you want to become a beta reader, or have suggestions, I’d love to hear from you! 8th of January 2021: This article has been revised and updated, scientifically and in terms of dead links. Revision made by Tomás Simões (@putadagravidade /…
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An old patent inspired the new "Y-zipper", a three-sided fastener
A new system developed at MIT CSAIL helps users design three-sided fasteners called “Y-zippers,” then 3D prints them. The devices can be attached or embedded to camping equipment, medical gear, robots, and art installations, seamlessly switching each item between soft and rigid.
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Past Time to Tell the Public:It Will Probably Go Pandemic, We Should Prepare Now
by Jody Lanard and Peter M. Sandman NOTE FROM IAN: The expert risk communication team of Lanard and Sandman has given me permission to post their very well-considered reply to my question of them just
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Open access to ACM Digital Library during coronavirus pandemic
For the next 3 months, through 6/30/20, ACM is making all work published by ACM in the ACM Digital Library freely accessible.
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Heat Pumps Work Miracles
[ An updated treatment of some of this material appears in Chapter 6 of the Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (free) textbook. ]
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Cryptography is a science, not engineering
If we were still in the 1990s, I would agree with Thomas. 1990s cryptography was full of holes, and the best you could hope for was to know how your tools were broken so you could try to work around their deficiencies. This was a time when DES and RC4 were widely used, despite having well-known flaws. This was a time…
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How does the US use water?
Water infrastructure often gets less attention and focus than other types of infrastructure.
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Lost in Math
Sabine Hossenfelder’s new book Lost in Math should be starting to appear in bookstores around now. It’s very good and you should get a copy. I hope that the book will receive a lot of a…
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Color Spaces
Interactive article explaining color spaces and how they're used to express color.
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Some people who take psychedelics continue hallucinating indefinitely
[Related to: Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain, HPPD And The Specter Of Permanent Side Effects] I. Hallucinogen persisting perceptual disorder is a condition where people wh…
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The Dangers of Low Head Dams (2019)
Dams serve a wide variety of purposes from hydropower to flood control to storage of water for municipal and industrials uses. But when a dam’s useful purpose fades away, the structure itself still remains. Dams come in all shapes and sizes, but contrary to what you might think, the most dangerous d
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Dana-Farberications at Harvard University
“Imagine what mistakes might be found in the raw data if anyone was allowed to look!” – Sholto David
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How strong would a magnetic field have to be to kill you?
There’s a great joke in Futurama, the cartoon comedy show, about a horror movie for robots. In the movie, a planet of robots is terrorized by a giant “non-metallic being” (a mons…
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Cancer Progress: Much More Than You Wanted To Know (2018)
Official statistics say we are winning the War on Cancer. Cancer incidence rates, mortality rates, and five-year-survival rates have generally been moving in the right direction over the past few d…
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The Clock in the Mountain
A work crane at the Clock site in western Texas. There is a Clock ringing deep inside a mountain. It is a huge Clock, hundreds of feet tall, designed to tick for 10,000 years. Every once in a while the … Continue reading →
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I Survived the “Destroying Angel” (2006)
This memoir of a near-fatal mushroom poisoning was written by our most fortunate guest, Richard Eshelman. Happy Thanksgiving, all.
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The rise and fall of peer review
Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing
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Reports of the death of dental cavities are greatly exaggerated
If I asked you to name the most common chronic disease in children, what would you say? Asthma comes top of mind, but there is something five times more common in kids: cavities. We don’t typically think of dental cavities as a chronic disease—in part because of the separation between medicine and dentistry—but it is…
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The swimming of a dead fish (2018)
When I was a child, my father would take me trout fishing, and I spent hours marveling from the riverbank at the trouts’ ability to, seemingly effortlessly, h
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Covid and the Heart: It Spares No One – Johns Hopkins
New evidence suggests anyone infected with COVID is at higher risk for heart issues—a risk that persists even in relatively healthy people long after the illness has passed.
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What Developmental Milestones Are You Missing?
[Epistemic status: Speculative. I can’t make this post less condescending and elitist, so if you don’t like condescending elitist things, this might not be for you.] Developmental psych…
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Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work?
How Stephen Wolfram helped with the theory of interstellar travel, communication with aliens and questions from the actors in “Arrival”, the movie.