61
Poor sleep drove me insane, and my long path to recovery
I'm sharing my experience dealing with what might be the most underdiagnosed and under-treated health disorder today.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,038 posts.
62
63
64
Have attention spans been declining?
[This is one of the finalists in the SMTM Mysteries Contest, by a reader writing under the pseudonym Cennfaeladh. We’ll be posting about one of these a week until we have gotten through all th…
65
Suspicious Discontinuities
If you read any personal finance forums late last year, there's a decent chance you ran across a question from someone who was desperately trying to lose money before the end of the year. There are a number of ways someone could do this; one commonly suggested scheme was to buy put options that were expected to expire…
66
The scientific “unit” we call the decibel
Celebrating a rare dumpster fire in the kingdom of science.
67
Radios, how do they work?
A brief introduction to antennas, superheterodyne receivers, and signal modulation schemes.
68
Reprojecting the Perseverance landing footage onto satellite imagery
The landing of the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover last month amazed the world. The stunning footage of the descent shows each stage of the sequence. If you have not seen it already you can watch it here .
69
70
The Dunning-Kruger effect is autocorrelation
Do unskilled people actually underestimate their incompetence?
71
72
John Conway
I was greatly saddened to learn that John Conway died yesterday from COVID-19, aged 82. My own mathematical areas of expertise are somewhat far from Conway’s; I have played for instance with …
73
Color Night Vision (2016) [video]
The X27 camera takes videos in darkness that looks like they were shot in the daytime. And they’re in color…none of this black and white, thermal, or infrared s
74
I tried making artificial sunlight at home
Some time ago, I saw this video by DIY Perks where they make artificial sunlight at home with a 500W LED and a gigantic (1.2m) parabolic reflector. I've been...
75
Homemade polarimetric synthetic aperture radar drone
Designing a cheap synthetic aperture radar mounted on FPV drone.
76
How fast the days are getting longer (2023)
Here in the northern hemisphere the vernal equinox just passed and the days arequickly getting longer. One of my col...
77
OpenAI’s policies hinder reproducible research on language models
LLMs have become privately-controlled research infrastructure
78
Deep learning gets the glory, deep fact checking gets ignored
AI, science, education, & ethics
79
Why I Keep a Research Blog
Before I started taking writing seriously, I had a loose grasp of many mathematical and technical concepts; and I was not sure how to tackle open-ended problems. Maintaining this research blog has clarified my thoughts and improved how I approach research problems. The goal of this post is to explain why I have found…
80
How to make a CPU – a simple picture-based explanation
The purpose of this article is to explain how to make a CPU out of rocks and sand as fast as possible without using too many words. As the world of proprietary hardware and software crushes in around us, we risk losing the ability to make things for ourselves as individuals. It is for this reason that I felt compelled…
81
Scott’s Supreme Quantum Supremacy FAQ
You’ve seen the stories—in the Financial Times, Technology Review, CNET, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, or elsewhere—saying that a group at Google has now achieved quantum computation…
82
Why does a spray bottle work?
Exploring a simple machine I took apart a simple spray bottle to see how it kept fluid flowing only in one direction from the reservoir to the nozzle. It does so with simple check valves made of two pieces of plastic, a spring, and a small sphere. It’s a simple way to solve a tricky problem. A simple spray bottle One…
83
Phased Array Microphone (2023)
A 192-channel phased array microphone, with FPGA data acquisition and beamforming/visualization on the GPU. Phased arrays allow for applications not possible with traditional directional microphones, as the directionality can be changed instantly, after the recording is made, or even be focused at hundreds of…
84
The Wolfram Physics Project
How does our universe work? Scientist Stephen Wolfram opens up his ongoing Wolfram Physics Project to a global effort. His team will livestream work in progress, post working materials, release software tools and hold educational programs.
85
How does a screen work?
From electron guns to tiny electric crystals - digital displays have always been the unsung hero of computing.
86
Replace peer review with “peer replication” (2021)
As I’ve posted before and many others have noted , there is a serious problem with lack of adequate replication in many fields of science. The current peer review process is a dreadful combination of being both very fallible and also a huge hurdle to communicating important science.
87
Why three prongs?
Why do AC cords need three prongs? If there is no positive or negative in AC systems, why do we have HOT and NEUTRAL? I attempt to shed light on some of these mysteries.
88
Why is the liver so weirdly regenerative?
the question everyone is asking
89
On whether changes in bedroom CO2 levels affect sleep quality
Self-experiment on whether changes in bedroom CO₂ levels affect sleep quality
90
Lab Leak 2.0?
“If a $1000 PhD side project could kill millions of people, we must end viral [gain-of-function research], or it may end us.”