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Watching Paint Dry: The unexpectedly interesting story of car coatings
The unexpectedly interesting story of car coatings and what they tell us about the modern world
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
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Seaflooding
The Surprising Solution to Mitigate Climate Change, Create More Life, and Grow the Economy
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Translating Akkadian clay tablets with ChatGPT?
Alles wat Jan bezighoudt, interesseert en irriteert... en ook een beetje onzin...
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Introduction to the Fourier transform for image processing (2001)
The definitons of the transform (to expansion coefficients) and the inverse transform are given below:
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Ultra Deep look at Messier 81 and 82
An ultra deep 393h look at the galaxy pair M81/M82 - Amateurs reveal full Ha stream for the first time
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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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Science is a strong-link problem
OR: How to eat fewer asparagus beetles
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Why do prime numbers make these spirals? (2019)
A curious pattern in polar plots with prime numbers, together with discussion of Dirichlet's theorem
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Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a giant geothermal power plant?
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.
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Open Questions
Some anomalies/questions which are not necessarily important, but do puzzle me or where I find existing explanations to be unsatisfying.
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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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The basics of decoupling capacitors
How to stabilize digital supply voltages - and why most of the online advice on this topic is suspect.
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SpaceX's Texas Rocket Is Going to Cause a Lot More Damage Than Anyone Thinks
On Friday, the Federal Aviation Administration issued a license for SpaceX to launch the first orbital test of Starship, the largest rocket in human history, as soon as this Monday, April 17th.
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Understanding large language models: A cross-section of the relevant literature
A Cross-Section of the Most Relevant Literature To Get Up to Speed
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P < 0.05 Considered Harmful
The unreasonable persistence of an old standard
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My diatribe against “skeptics” (2016)
April 10, 2023. The backlash was immediate after I spoke at the 2016 Northeast Conference on Science & Skepticism , which bills itself as a “celebration of science and critical thinking.” Although the conference had allotted me 10 minutes for questions, the stage manager, Jamy
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I think faster than light travel is possible [video]
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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Nuclear power is too safe
If you don't pursue safety in a way that is cost effective, you are killing people.[David Okrent]
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Bicycle
Interactive article explaining the physics of a bicycle.
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Robot Learns to See in 30 Minutes (2022)
TL;DR: Learning to walk from pixels in the real world by using proprioception as supervision.
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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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What Will Transformers Transform?
Generative Pre-trained Transformer models (GPTs) are now all the rage and have inspired op-eds being written by everyone from Henry Kissinger (WSJ) to Noam Chomsky (NYTimes) in just the last month. That sure is some hype level.
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OpenAI’s policies hinder reproducible research on language models
LLMs have become privately-controlled research infrastructure