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Toward a Predictive Theory of Depression
[Epistemic status: Total wild speculation] I. The predictive processing model offers compelling accounts of autism and schizophrenia. But Surfing Uncertainty and related sources I’ve read are…
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,038 posts.
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Cryptography is a science, not engineering
If we were still in the 1990s, I would agree with Thomas. 1990s cryptography was full of holes, and the best you could hope for was to know how your tools were broken so you could try to work around their deficiencies. This was a time when DES and RC4 were widely used, despite having well-known flaws. This was a time…
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Autopsy of a deep learning paper
Introduction I read a lot of deep learning papers, typically a few/week. I've read probably several thousands of papers. My general problem with papers in machine learning or deep learning is that often they sit
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How Insects Breathe
Tại Việt Nam, sự gia tăng phổ biến của trò chơi điện tử đang định hình lại bối cảnh cá cược thể thao. Khi các game thủ trẻ đắm mình vào các cuộc thi ảo, niềm đam mê của họ sẽ
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Did the W-boson just “break the standard model”?
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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Mathematics I Use (2012)
An explanation of the forms of mathematics I use on a daily basis as a working software engineer.
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Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)
Short answer: because math. Longer answer: because prime numbers don’t divide into each other evenly. To understand what follows, you need to know some facts about the physics of vibrating st…
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Empirical Notes on Kissing
Before my first kiss, I scoured The Internet (Google Scholar + tracing blog posts back to their underlying studies - this was some time ago so I don’t still have the sources) for every valuable scrap of information available on the topic while trying to stray away from anything opinion-based. This is the result.
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Heavy Metal and Natural Language Processing
Edit: Part 2 of this post can be found here , and part 3 here . Most of the code used in these posts is available here .
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The physics of that ‘kickalicious’ kick
Last Friday, the New York Times ran a cover page story about Håvard Rugland, a Norwegian man who scored an NFL tryout for the Jets, based on a youtube video called Kickalicious that has picked up n…
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The main thing about Phenylacetone meth is that there's so much of it
Since around 2009, methamphetamines have been made with phenylacetone (P2P). Is there a chemical different causing schizophrenia?
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We Can Terraform the American West
Why is there almost nothing on the left hand side of the USA? Water scarcity! We’re missing 300 million Americans. We’re missing 30 global cities west of 100 degrees longitude. We shoul…
553
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…
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CDC officials’ resignation emails
The end of an era.
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We need a GitHub of Science
Publishing is central to Academia, but its publishing system is outclassed by what Open Source software developers have in GitHub
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The Cuboid: A DIY air purifier that's better than a box fan
Designs for a quieter, more energy efficient purifier, and data proving it really works.
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Scott and Scurvy: How the cure for scurvy was lost
Writing about the first winter the men spent on the ice, Cherry-Garrard casually mentions an astonishing lecture on scurvy by one of the expedition’s doctors:
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Geometry, Algebra, and Intuition (2017)
I have a confession to make: I have always found symbolic algebra more intuitive than geometric pictures. I think you’re supposed to feel the opposite way, and I greatly admire people who think and communicate in pictures, but for me, it’s usually a struggle.
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Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01
[You can follow me on social media: @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social and see my publications etc., at https://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks ]
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How I Learned to Love Algebraic Geometry
A more polished version of this article appeared on Nautilus on 2019 February 28. This version has some more material. How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Algebraic Geometry In my 50s, too old …
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Calculus for the Curious
Some weeks ago I got involved in a discussion on Twitter about, which books to recommend on the history of calculus. Somebody chimed in that Steven Strogatz’s new book would tell you all that you n…