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Per capita CO₂ emissions Over Time
An interactive visualization from Our World in Data.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 49 posts.
2
The Relativity of Wrong (1989)
I received a letter from a reader the other day. It was handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult to read. Nevertheless, I tried to make it out just in case it might prove to be important.
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Nicotine (2016)
On the benefits and lack of demerits of nicotine (research up to 2015)
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SR-71 Blackbird Speed Check Story
There were a lot of things we couldn't do in an SR-71, but we were the fastest guys on the block and loved reminding our fellow aviators of this...
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There’s no such thing as a tree phylogenetically (2021)
Dendronization – Evolving into a tree-like morphology. (In the style of “carcinization”.) From ‘dendro’, the ancient Greek root for tree.
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[109] Data Falsificada (Part 1): “Clusterfake”
This is the introduction to a four-part series of posts detailing evidence of fraud in four academic papers co-authored by Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino. In 2021, we and a team o…
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Almost all of the world’s mammal biomass is humans and livestock
Humans and livestock make up 95% of the world’s mammal biomass; wild mammals are just 5%.
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Extreme poverty: How far have we come, and how far do we still have to go?
The world has made immense progress against extreme poverty, but it is still the reality for almost one in ten people worldwide.
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Bicycle
Interactive article explaining the physics of a bicycle.
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The Dunning-Kruger effect is autocorrelation
Do unskilled people actually underestimate their incompetence?
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Why Not Mars
It's slow, expensive, the engineering is mostly port-a-potty chemistry, and the best-case outcome is that thirty years from now we’ll get to watch someone remotely operate a soil scoop from Mars instead of Pasadena
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Why was Roman concrete so durable?
Researchers have discovered ancient Roman concrete-manufacturing strategies that incorporated self-healing. Applying this knowledge toward modern cement production, they hope to improve the material’s environmental impact.
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The crash of Air France flight 447 (2021)
The story of the infamous disappearance of an Airbus A330 over the Atlantic, and the fundamentally human mistakes which led to the tragedy.
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The Neural Net Tank Urban Legend
AI folklore tells a story about a neural network trained to detect tanks which instead learned to detect time of day; investigating, this probably never happened.
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GPT-2 as step toward general intelligence (2019)
A machine learning researcher writes me in response to yesterday’s post, saying:I still think GPT-2 is a brute-force statistical pattern matcher which blends up the internet and gives you bac…
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The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005)
An allegory against complacency about aging and death.
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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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GraphCast: AI model for weather forecasting
Our state-of-the-art model delivers 10-day weather predictions at unprecedented accuracy in under one minute
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How to see bright, vivid images in your mind’s eye (2016)
Learn to improve the brightness and clarity of images in your mind's eye. Image Streaming is an easy technique to learn. Is it a cure for aphantasia?
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Admiral Rickover's 'Paper Reactor' Memo (1953)
Rickover's famous speech about the distinction between academic (paper) reactors and practical reactors.
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My Left Kidney
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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.
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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’.
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ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
arXiv’s goal is equitable access to scientific research for all – and to achieve this, we have been working to make research papers more accessible for arXiv…
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I’m so sorry for psychology’s loss, whatever it is
The plane crashed and nobody checked the bodies
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