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Nitrogen Triiodide (2016)
Nitrogen Triiodide
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
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The Blowtorch Theory: A new model for structure formation in the universe
How early, sustained, supermassive black hole jets carved out cosmic voids, shaped filaments, and generated magnetic fields
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Square Theory
The story starts in Crosscord, the crossword Discord server. Over 5,000 users strong, the server has emerged as a central hub for the online crossword community, a buzzing, sometimes overwhelming, sometimes delightful town square where total noobs, veteran constructors, and champion solvers alike come together to talk…
274
The Art of Fugue – Contrapunctus I (2021)
JS Bach’s last set of works, collectively titled The Art of Fugue, was published shortly after his death. It was not a big hit. Dense counterpoint was deeply unfashionable at that time, as We…
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Dr John C. Clark, a scientist who disarmed atomic bombs twice
One scientist did it twice
276
What If We Had Bigger Brains? Imagining Minds Beyond Ours
Stephen Wolfram explores how the number of neural connections affects capabilities like language and abstraction. How far we could go accounting for neural nets and LLMS, the fundamental nature of computation, neuroscience and the operation of brains.
277
Caesar's Last Breath
Caesar’s Last Breath — Charlie Sabino.
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That fractal that's been up on my wall for years
Warning: Math, Handwaving I spent a lot of time doodling in middle school instead of whatever middle schoolers are supposed to do. Somewhere between the Cool S’s and Penrose triangles I found a neat way to fill up graph paper by combining and copying squares.
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Planetfall
Gentle readers, I have just wrapped up a fun side project that will be of great interest to a very small number of you. The result of one of the most technically demanding efforts of my career, I a…
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The scientific “unit” we call the decibel
Celebrating a rare dumpster fire in the kingdom of science.
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Getting a paper accepted
Page 1 Accepts, the Rest Avoids Rejection
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Satellites Spotting Depth
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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AI in my plasma physics research didn’t go the way I expected
I used AI in my plasma physics research and it didn’t go the way I expected.
284
Dead Stars Don’t Radiate
Three guys claim that any heavy chunk of matter emits Hawking radiation, even if it’s not a black hole: • Michael F. Wondrak, Walter D. van Suijlekom and Heino Falcke, Gravitational pair…
285
“The Mind in the Wheel” lays out a new foundation for the science of mind
OR: the ideas your mother warned you about
286
It Awaits Your Experiments
You may have heard of Christian Bök. You may have read about him on this very blog if you’ve been hanging out here long enough. Perhaps you were even one of the very select few to witness the seminal talk I gave back in 2016 [1] —“ScArt: or, How to Tell When You’ve Finished Fucking”— which climaxed with a glowing…
287
Air Traffic Control
Air traffic control has been in the news lately, on account of my country's declining ability to do it. Well, that's a long-term trend, resulting from decades of under-investment, severe capture by our increasingly incompetent defense-industrial complex, no small degree of management incompetence in the FAA, and…
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Using NASA’s SMAP satellite to detect L-band interference
It was launched to measure moisture. Now it’s ghost-trailing jammers across an electronic battlefield.
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So Much Blood
but how much exactly?
291
When Abandoned Mines Collapse
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] In December of 2024, a huge sinkhole opened up on I-80 near Wharton, New Jersey, creating massive traffic delays as crews worked to figure out what happened and get it fixed. Since then, it happened again in February 2025 and th
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Is Planet Nine Alone in the Outer System?
Planet 9 might be our Ultima Thule . Hell would certainly be freezing over at 700 AU. Whether this tentative observation is Planet 9 or not, it is still an interesting observation and an example, I think, of proof that AIs will not do all our science for us. (At least not LLMs).
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Unparalleled Misalignments
This is a list of Unparalleled Misalignments, pairs of non-synonymous phrases where the words in one phrase are each synonyms of the words in the other. I've maintained this list since 2018; attributions (when known) can be seen on hover.
294
Old Soviet Venus descent craft nearing Earth reentry
That soon-to-reenter Cosmos 482 is getting increased attention by satellite trackers – and new imagery provides some interesting details.
295
Reversible computing with mechanical links and pivots
With the concern that “Moore’s Law is dead,” new interest has grown for unconventional forms of computing. This includes:
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How to build Intrinsic Motivation: a review of the science
I dig into the research on intrinsic motivation. Super interesting subject. Long but hopefully quite thorough.
297
100 Years to Solve an Integral (2020)
The integral of sec(x) is well known to any beginners calculus student. Yet this integral was once a major outstanding maths problem. It was first introduced...
298
Passing planes and other whoosh sounds
A blog about signals, programming, music, and other stuff.
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An Introduction to Stochastic Calculus (2022)
Through a couple of different avenues I wandered, yet again, down a rabbit hole leading to the topic of this post. The first avenue was through my main focus on a particular machine learning topic th