Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 689 posts.
By good luck we have been able to make an emergency landing on this uninhabited space station. There have been no casualties. We all count ourselves fortunate to have found safe haven at a moment when the expedition was clearly set on disaster.
[EDITOR'S NOTE: In marking this year's 25th anniversary of Edge , we are presenting original lectures from eminent scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who are changing the way we think about science and our place in the world.]
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…
MINERVA-II1: Successful image capture, landing on Ryugu and hop!
Stephen Wolfram shares what he learned in researching Ada Lovelace's life, writings about the Analytical Engine, and computation of Bernoulli numbers.
Nicholas Polson has, by my count using his SSRN page, already written 258 working papers in 2026 alone. He’s already written (or at least published to SSRN), six papers today, August 26, 2026.
Modified curve tracer is applying AC voltage. Horizontal axis represents voltage and the vertical axis represents current. In both cases, the curve always passes through zero voltage and current. This requirement must be met in order to be classified as a memristor.
Some people on the internet are getting very excited at the (unconfirmed) reports of an "Earth-like" exoplanet orbiting Proxima Centauri , a mere 4.25 light-years away from Earth. If correct, the planet is orbiting in the liquid water zone around our nearest stellar neighbour and is of the same order of mass as the…
Using BLAST is easy. I'm going to show you how easy and how to prove that SARS-Cov-2 is man-made
[This is part one of a two-part series. The second part can be found here: Symmetries in Projective Geometric Algebra .]
I’m a (50%) professor of mathematics and (50%) professor of molecular & cell biology at UC Berkeley. There have been plenty of days when I have spent the working hours with biologists and…
Out there in the wider world—OK, OK, among Luboš Motl, and a few others who comment on this blog—there appears to be a widespread opinion that P≠NP is just “a fashionable dogma of…
We can define roundness in many ways. For example, as you may know, the circle is the shape that given a fixed perimeter maximizes the area. This definition has many problems. One of the problems is that countries generally have chaotic perimeters (also known as borders), so they tend to be much longer than they seem…
Interactive article explaining alpha compositing concepts.
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
Mathematical mistake/error-rates limit our understanding of rare risks and ability to defend against them.
MIT professor Scott Aaronson discusses new Google experiments that suggest the D-Wave computer exploits quantum phenomena.
Noether's theorem is an amazing result which lets physicists get conserved quantities from symmetries of the laws of nature. Time translation symmetry gives conservation of energy; space translation symmetry gives conservation of momentum; rotation symmetry gives conservation of angular momentum, and so on.
During WWII, statistician Abraham Wald told the RAF to add armor where it didn't seem planes needed it. But he was right.
[By prior agreement, this post will be cross-posted on Microsoft’s Q# blog, even though it has nothing to do with the Q# programming language. It does, however, contain many examples th…
Reviews the history of why psychologists moved from a word shape model of word recognition to a letter recognition model.
