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Steven Weinberg has died
I heard this morning the news that Steven Weinberg passed away yesterday at the age of 88. He was arguably the dominant figure in theoretical particle physics during its period of great success fr…
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,038 posts.
812
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts (2020)
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts said Richard Feynman. Feynman had a Nobel prize in physics. He was a remarquable educator: his lecture notes are still popular. He foresaw nanotechnology and quantum computing. He is credited with identifying the cause of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. There is…
813
Making the Monty Hall problem weirder but obvious
It’s this simple: Do you want what’s behind one door or the other nine?
814
I Regret Quitting Astrophysics
In 2013 I decided to quit my career in astrophysics, move back “home” and become a data scientist. The blog post I wrote about my decision was probably my best read publication as a professional astronomer and it was moving to read all the reactions from people who were struggling with similar decisions. I meant every…
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Gödel and the unreality of time
In 1949, in a festschrift devoted to Einstein , Kurt Gödel published a very short but profound paper titled “A Remark About the Relati...
817
Societies with Little Coercion Have Little Mental Illness (2013)
Throughout history, societies have existed with far less coercion than ours, and while these societies have had far less consumer goods and what modernity calls “efficiency,” they also have had far…
818
Why does an A note sound different across instruments?
If you pull up a tuner app on your phone and play an A note on a piano, the tuner will say ~440 hz. Do the same thing on a violin's A note and you'll also get 440 hz.
819
New Evidence Against the Standard Model of Cosmology
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
820
Study Tips from Richard Feynman
“Study hard what interests you the most.”
821
Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers
Before we get nerd sniped by the shiny engineering details, ask the only question that matters. Why compute in orbit? Why should a watt or a flop 250 miles up be more valuable than one on the surface? What advantage justifies moving something as mundane as matrix multiplication into LEO?
822
Fusion Foolery
Great. The fusion hype is bad enough already. Now its resurgence is going to interrupt the series of posts I’m in the middle of publishing in order for this post to be “timely.”
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Can a Human See a Single Photon? (1996)
The human eye is very sensitive; but can we see a single photon? The answer is yes: sensors in the retina can respond to a single photon. But neural filters only allow a signal to pass to the brain to trigger a conscious response when at least about five to nine arrive within less than 100 ms. If we could consciously…
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A deep dive into self-improving AI and the Darwin-Gödel Machine
How the Darwin-Gödel Machine rewrites its own code to improve, and whether we can trust it
828
Satellites Spotting Ships
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
829
How large is that number in the Law of Large Numbers?
All large numbers are large, but some are larger than others
830
Why are smokestacks so tall?
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] “The big black stacks of the Illium Works of the Federal Apparatus Corporation spewed acid fumes and soot over the hundreds of men and women who were lined up before the red-brick employment office.” That’s the first line of one
831
So you want to build a carbon capture company
Would you like to win one hundred million bucks from Elon Musk? Carbon capture (CC) is all the rage these days, with dozens of companies springing up to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and help stab…
832
What's the difference between 0/0 and 1/0?
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
833
It Awaits Your Experiments
You may have heard of Christian Bök. You may have read about him on this very blog if you’ve been hanging out here long enough. Perhaps you were even one of the very select few to witness the seminal talk I gave back in 2016 [1] —“ScArt: or, How to Tell When You’ve Finished Fucking”— which climaxed with a glowing…
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Why are roller coaster loops not circular?
Why are the loops on roller coasters never circular?
836
How “See a Satellite Tonight” Works
See A Satellite Tonight is my most successful side project so far, with 5 million users since launch in 2019. It's been entirely a solo project, and I've used it as a proving ground for a bunch of tech that I wanted to learn. It took dozens of APIs and services to put together the experience I wanted: The front page…
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J.C. Bose: 60 GHz in the 1890s
(1) The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.
838
The Hidden Engineering of Niagara Falls
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] Niagara Falls is one of the most spectacular waterfalls in the world. With a vertical drop of more than 50 meters or 164 feet and a flow rate that often exceeds 2800 cubic meters per second or 100,000 cubic feet per second, it’s
839
Magnesium Self-Experiments
3 magnesium self-experiments on magnesium ʟ-threonate and magnesium citrate.
840
The Arsenic DNA paper exposes flaws in peer review
a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things