Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,038 posts.
NASA just announced the lunar landers for the Artemis program. To everyone’s surprise, SpaceX’s massive Starship is one of three landers NASA chose alongside Blue Origin and Dynetics. Understandably, this is bringing up a lot of questions. Some of which we will answer in my next video/article: “Should NASA just cancel…
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] In December of 2024, a huge sinkhole opened up on I-80 near Wharton, New Jersey, creating massive traffic delays as crews worked to figure out what happened and get it fixed. Since then, it happened again in February 2025 and th
Exploiting the quirks of human vision to make images smaller, without looking awful.
A few years ago, I worked on a project to investigate the potential of machine learning to transform healthcare through modeling electronic medical records. I walked away deeply disillusioned with the whole field and I really don’t think that the field needs machine learning right now. What it does need is plenty of…
Dams serve a wide variety of purposes from hydropower to flood control to storage of water for municipal and industrials uses. But when a dam’s useful purpose fades away, the structure itself still remains. Dams come in all shapes and sizes, but contrary to what you might think, the most dangerous d
a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things
I’ve been following your blog for a while and checked in today to see if there was a thread on last week’s big-splash Stanford antibody study (the one with the shocking headline that they got 50 positive results in a “random” sample of 3330 antibody tests, suggesting that nearly 2% of the population has been infected…
Doga Tekin's website.
Capsaicin, the active substance in chili peppers, acts on vanilloid receptors (TRPV1) and alters adrenaline and endorphine levels.
I posted on When did Math get so hard? a commenter pointed out that one can also ask When did Computer Science Theory Get so Hard? For t...
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
Part of my series on common misconceptions in space journalism. It is an unwritten rule of space journalism that any article about Moon or Mars bases needs to have a conceptual drawing of habitatio…
Artists say all colors are a mixture of red, yellow, and blue. But physics and TV screens and printers disagree. How does color really work?
Peter Dorman points to this post on statistical significance and p-values by Timothy Taylor, editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, a highly influential publication of the American Economic Association.
It’s a huge surprise, and shows up in the most unlikely of places!
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
If cement weren't 10,000 years old, it would seem like a futuristic technology: liquid rock!
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…
The submarine is a surprisingly ancient technology—at least in its early, primitive forms. The idea is quite simple, that a well-enough-sealed boat ought to be able to submerge and resurface. It's the practicalities that make the whole thing difficult. It is generally considered that the US Civil War was the first use…
Quantum computers might sound a bit exotic and far into the future, but in reality, they are now accessible in the cloud or through emulators for everyone to write quantum code. In this tutorial, we’ll go through how you can program a simple quantum computer to generate random numbers.
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
The Fermi Paradox: There should be 100,000 intelligent alien civilizations in our galaxy — so why haven't we found any of them?
The human genome project was inaugurated at the beginning of the decade as an ambitious international effort to determine the complete DNA sequence of human beings and several experimental animals. The justification for this undertaking is both scientific and medical. By understanding the genetic makeup of an organism…
Update (12/5): The Google team, along with Gil Kalai, have raised questions about whether the results of the new BosonSampling experiment might be easier to spoof classically than the USTC team tho…
I spent my week-end reading comments from theoretical physicists,geodesists, and other scientists, speculating on the news of the OPERA experiment that appe...
I got something wrong; introducing Airship Industries
