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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
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Batteries: How cheap can they get?
How dirt cheap batteries will completely transform our electricity grid, paving the way for solar and wind and replacing grid reinforcements with grid buffers.
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Why Bridges Don't Sink
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] The essence of a bridge is not just that it goes over something, but that there’s clear space underneath for a river, railway, or road. Maybe this is already obvious to you, but bridges present a unique structural challenge. In
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Why is Chile so long?
Chile is so long, it's curved. How long is it? Why not longer? Why is no other country as thin? How does that make Chileans incomprehensible?
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The physics of airplane flight
A common misconception about wings is that they need to have the classic airfoil shape to work. In reality, just about any surface can create lift and function as a wing.
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Will we ever get fusion power?
“Every one of the stars in the sky uses fusion to generate enormous amounts of energy. Why shouldn’t we?”
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The Point of the Banach Tarski Theorem (2015)
One of my favourite Limited Audience Jokes (although technically it's actually a riddle) goes:
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Why your brain is 3 milion more times efficient than GPT-4
Wild ramblings, raport from the field about choosing Vector Database for a particular project and a little bit of a rant about the current state of AI and how it's perceived, why human brains are a wonder of nature, and why it's far from 'thinking' and 'consciousness'.
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Twitter and the spread of academic knowledge
Serendipity without physical proximity? Maybe, maybe not.
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How does a computer/calculator compute logarithms?
Summer of Math Exposition 3 - How does a computer/calculator compute logarithms?
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Rotation curves: still flat after a million light-years
That rotation curves become flat at large radii is one of the most famous results in extragalactic astronomy. This had been established by Vera Rubin and her collaborators by the late 1970s. There …
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Fern Hollow Bridge should have been closed years before it collapsed
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] On January 28, 2022, about an hour before dawn, the four-lane Fern Hollow Bridge in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, collapsed without warning. Five vehicles, including an articulating bus, fell with the bridge, and another car drove o
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Satellites Spotting Ships
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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Does anybody know this fractal? (2012)
Experimenting with the "divisibility" of complex numbers, I stumbled across this thingy. It looks like a fractal. Although the formula does not do any iterations. It reminds me of something. But I dont know what. Doing a Google image search brings up a couple of galaxies :) This image shows the region from (-1/-1) to…
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Decade of the Battery
A repost with some updates.
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Borges on Chaos Theory
About a weird, lovely short story
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When (if ever) did the Sun set on the British Empire?
It hasn't. Yet. But only because of a few dozen people living in an area smaller than Disney World.
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A Revolution in Biology?
how developmental biology might contain the secrets to life, intelligence, and immortality
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Ultrasonic investigations in shopping centres
Many public address systems emit a continuous near-ultrasonic sound that is used for system health monitoring.
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The regenerative urban garden I: No-till gardening
I am an advocate of regenerative farming . But I’m not a farmer myself. The piece of land I steward is 1/3 acre — still sizable for an urban lot, but laughably minuscule compared to what Real Farmers are working with.
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Scientists should use AI as a tool, not an oracle
How AI hype leads to flawed research that fuels more hype
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An intuitive guide to Maxwell's equations (2020)
An Intuitive and Visual Guide to Maxwell's Equations
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Einstein went to his office just so he could walk home with Gödel
Albert Einstein used to say that he went to his office at the Institute for Advanced Study “just to have the privilege of walking home with Kurt Gödel.” The two would meet at Einstein’s home each day between 10 and 11 and undertake the half-hour walk to the institute. At 1 or 2 in the afternoon they’d walk back…
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A seventh-grader student found a beautiful proof to Thales' Theorem (2002)
A useful theorem attributed to the probably first mathematician ever, Thales of Miletus (ca. 624 BC-ca. 546 BC) is one of most elementary and intuitive ever stated.
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My Hour of Memoryless Lucidity
Yesterday, I had a coronectomy: the top halves of my bottom wisdom teeth were surgically removed. It was my first time being sedated, and I didn’t know what to expect. While I was unconscious…
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The Lunacy of Artemis
Introduction A Note on Apollo I. The Rocket II. The Capsule III. The Orbit IV. Gateway V. The Lander VI. Refueling VII. Conclusion Notes
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Seven Dyson Sphere Candidates
A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from natural phenomena when enough stars are examined!
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Earth rotation limits in-body image stabilization to 6.3 stops (2020)
In 2016, Olympus Camera made some buzz in the photo world when they claimed that their new camera was capable of an impressive 6.5 stops of stabilization and that the limiting factor was in fact th…
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Reasons not to take Lumina's anticavity probiotic
It's unsafe and probably ineffective