The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
This page presents a scientific paper that has been redesigned as a sequence of illustrations with captions. This comic-like format, with tightly-coupled pictures and prose, allows the author to depict and describe simultaneously — show and tell.
An interactive introduction to spiking neuron models -- all in the browser. Learn about modeling neurons as dynamical systems and the computational properties of neurons.
For those who haven’t seen it: Aubrey de Grey, better known to the world as a radical life extension researcher, on Sunday posted a preprint on the arXiv claiming to prove that the chromatic …
The distances to the planets are fairly evenly distributed on a logarithmic scale, not only in our solar system but in extrasolar systems as well.
[I am not a neuroscientist and apologize in advance for any errors in this article. A recent study came out contradicting some of the claims mentioned here. See here for study, this comment for som…
Some of us have academic degrees and fancy university jobs, and publish peer-reviewed papers in prestigious journals. Let's call these peopl...
Background Reading: Earman and Norton, Infinite Pains: The Trouble with Supertasks and Comments on Laraudogoita's Supertask
One attempt at rationalizing astrology is to say that the gravitational effects of celestial bodies impact our bodies. To get an idea how hard the stars and planets pull on us, let's compare their gravitational attraction to that of cows at various distances. Newton's law of gravity says that the gravitational…
It just became a lot easier to learn about applied category theory, thanks to this free book: • Brendan Fong and David Spivak, Seven Sketches in Compositionality: An Invitation to Applied Cate…
tl;dr: A team from Columbia University led by Ken Shepard and Rafa Yuste claims to beat the 100 year old Sampling Theorem [1,2]. Apparently anti-aliasing filters are superfluous now because one can…
Detecting the Resonant Frequency of an Object with
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In causal inference, it is often important to study varying treatment effects: for example, a treatment could be more effective for men than for women, or for healthy than for unhealthy patients. Suppose a study is designed to have 80% power to detect a main effect at a 95% confidence level. Further suppose that…
How does the brain work? While neuroscience provides insights on small-scale processes and overall behavior, we don’t know much for sure about the learning and processing algorithms in between. In this blog post, I will give an introduction to what we know. Let’s take an engineering perspective and play evolution: How…
Isaac Asimov, in one of the anthologies he edited, mentioned reading some astronomical news back in the early 1960s about neutron stars. Being a science popularizer as well as a science fiction author, he was inspired to write a science essay about neutron stars. This was read by a few people but then more or less…
Earlier this month, I had the exciting opportunity to moderate a discussion between Professors Yann LeCun and Christopher Manning, ti...
Regular readers who care about such things — I think there are about three of you — will recall that I have long had a thing about just how unsound many of the claims for the presence of power law distributions in real data are, especially those made by theoretical physicists, who, with some honorable exceptions…
Some futurists try to foresee the future. Others attempt to shape it. Yet prolific science-fiction author and biochemist Isaac Asimov did both. Asimov not
[Epistemic status: very speculative, asserted with only ~30% confidence. On the other hand, even though psychiatrists don’t really talk about this it’s possible other groups know this a…
A cost-benefit analysis of the marginal cost of IVF-based embryo selection for intelligence and other traits with 2016–2017 state-of-the-art.
NASA engineer Kevin Gill stitched together images from two 1998 observations of Europa by the Galileo spacecraft to create this super smooth flyover video of th
It’s so much more than mass-energy equivalence; it’s the key to unlocking the quantum Universe.
SESSION 7: SPECIAL SESSION, 17th Annual EOS/ESD Symposium THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1995, 8:00 am SESSION 7: SPECIAL SESSION: ELECTROSTATIC CONSIDERATIONS IN INDUSTRY MODERATOR: D. Swenson, 3M 7.7 CASE STUDY - LARGE PLASTIC WEB ELECTROSTATIC PROBLEMS, RESULTS, AND CURE, D. Swenson, 3M Company Tremendous static charge…
