The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
The fun of owning rural property is that knowing where your land actually starts and ends is a guess usually. Sure, you have a parcel description, and maybe even an online service with “official” GIS boundaries (for us here in New Brunswick, this is GeoNB ). However, since it’s in the middle of the forest, the odds of…
What wet-lab chemistry can teach software engineers
Mathematics with a distinct visual perspective. Linear algebra, calculus, neural networks, topology, and more.
The mineral content of wheat and rice is lower today than sixty years ago. Why is that and what does it mean for how we eat?
Visualizing the weather anomalies in rainfall, sunshine and temperature in the Netherlands using data from the Dutch Meteorological Institute (KNMI).
It’s become fairly common knowledge that Yellowstone National Park, in addition to being incredibly beautiful, is sitting on top of an enormous supervolcano that catastrophically erupts every few hundred thousand years.
I’m currently writing a textbook on Electromagnetic Waves for my graduate optics students. I was reading up on zero refractive index materials for a chapter section and thought it would be fu…
A study of associations between stone tool evidence and fossil hominin remains shows that a wide range of species made stone artifacts.
Some mistakes feel worse than death.
What are "signal reflections", really? And do they matter in circuit design?
Do unskilled people actually underestimate their incompetence?
The earth contains a lot of titanium - it’s the ninth most abundant element in the earth’s crust.
mood, memory, education; five easy wins for behaviour change
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
Chris Grossack's math blog and professional website.
On the benefits and lack of demerits of nicotine (research up to 2015)
When we finished the Potato Diet Community Trial, we found ourselves in a pickle. The diet worked — people lost 10.6 lbs on average over only four weeks — and we had basically no idea why. No idea …
These technologies have developed a lot since 2008. Should we be any more optimistic about their potential to power Britain?
A blog dedicated to helping Science Fiction authors create and discuss worlds where a realistic setting can still serve the fiction.
Falling down a rabbit hole
How the value of π depends on the definition of distance.
In about 10 years, Apple has multiplied by 19 the number of transistors in its mobile processors. It corresponds roughly to a steady rate of improvement of 34% per year on the number of transistors, or a doubling every 2.5 years. In real dollars, an iPhone has roughly a constant price: the price tag of … Continue…
Necessary cognitive fortification against propaganda, pseudoscience, and general falsehood.
Recently a shoe store in France ran a promotion called “Rob It to Get It”, which invited customers to try to steal something by grabbing it and running out of the store. But there was a catch — the “security guard” was a professional sprinter, Méba Mickael Zeze. As you would expect, he is fast, but you might not…
In his TED Talk, Stephen Wolfram covers the emergence of space by the application of computational rules to spacetime, gravity and quantum mechanics to AI and LLMs. Computational irreducibility and the ruliad.
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Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you had a bunch of parameters to tune for a better result, but there were just too many to exhaustively search all possibilities? I recently saw a …
We synthesized the vast, contradictory scholarly literature on gender bias in academic science from 2000 to 2020. . . . Claims and counterclaims regarding the presence or absence of sexism span a range of evaluation contexts. Our approach relied on a combination of meta-analysis and analytic dissection. We evaluated…
