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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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A most bizarre and mysterious cocoon
by Matthew Cobb This bizarre photo was posted the other day on reddit’s “whatsthisbug” subreddit by Decapod73, with the following information: “Seriously, who makes egg case…
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High-quality schools can increase academic achievement among the poor (2010)
Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), an ambitious social experiment, combines community programs with charter schools. We provide the first empirical test of the causal impact of HCZ charters on educational outcomes. Both lottery and instrumental variable identification strategies suggest that the effects of attending an HCZ…
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Passive Solar Water Desalination
I know we are supposed to be worried about the world supply of fresh water. I have been hearing that at least for the last 40 years, and the statistics are alarming. According to the Global Commission on the Economics of Water: "We are seeing the consequences not of freak events, nor of population growth
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An Introduction to Stochastic Calculus (2022)
Through a couple of different avenues I wandered, yet again, down a rabbit hole leading to the topic of this post. The first avenue was through my main focus on a particular machine learning topic th
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Ultra Deep look at Messier 81 and 82
An ultra deep 393h look at the galaxy pair M81/M82 - Amateurs reveal full Ha stream for the first time
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Unusual Maps
A forum moderated by author and artist Edward Tufte, including discussion and questions dealing with information design.
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Re-using the heat in bathwater in Britain
FROM BEING A WASTE TO THE BATHER AND COUNTRY, AND FOR MAKING IT BENEFICIAL TO THE PUBLICK
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Solar panels + cold = A potential problem
You purchased a new Delta Pro and looked up the specifications - Delta Pro can take up to 1600w/150v/15a of solar input. Then you buy four EcoFlow 400w Rigid solar panels to plug them in series.
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Famous cognitive psychology experiments that failed to replicate
A quick reference
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What P vs. NP is about
We recently made a Polylog video about a nonstandard way of understanding the P vs NP problem. As usual, our goal was to present an underrated idea in a broadly understandable way, while being slig…
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How do plutonium-powered pacemakers work?
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Tides are weirder than you think
Our world relies on the sea more than ever: 80% of goods traded worldwide move by ship. Today’s mariners take it for granted that they can get an accurate chart of the tides for any location on Ear…
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Vi Hart on Stravinsky's Atonal Compositions [video]
What experimental composers have to do with copyright wrongs and the neuroscience of language.
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How NASA and ISRO discovered water on the Moon
The story of finding water on the Moon spans at least two decades and multiple space agencies, culminating in renewed lunar exploration plans across the world.
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Pi and the Golden Ratio
Two of my favorite numbers are pi: $latex \pi = 3.14159… $ and the golden ratio: $latex \displaystyle{ \Phi = \frac{\sqrt{5} + 1}{2} } = 1.6180339… $ They’re related: $latex \pi =…
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Aspartame: Once More Unto the Breach
Like it or not, there’s a clear scientific consensus
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Learn perfect pitch in 15 years
It was not easy or quick, and there were so many qualifiers that, for over a decade, I didn’t really think I “deserved” the label. But as I got older, those qualifiers started dropping off one by one, and today I’m convinced that I have perfect pitch. I describe my musical journey and thoughts on what perfect pitch…
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Weighing a Car with Tire Pressures
The first thing I wanted to do with my Saab 96 was to establish a baseline weight.
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An Iron Curtain Has Descended Upon Psychopharmacology
Imagine if a chemist told you offhandedly that the Russians had different chemical elements than we did. Here in America, we use elements like lithium and silicon and bismuth. We have figured out l…
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What are the complex numbers, really?
Where did complex numbers come from? You might think that people invented \(i\) just so that they had a solution to the quadratic equat...
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How to date a recording using background electrical noise
Three men were accused of selling firearms to South London gangs. At their 2012 trial in Croydon Crown Court, the prosecution played the jury a recording, taken undercover, of the trio allegedly arranging a sale. But the men’s lawyers claimed that the recording was a fake, and that the police had fabricated it by…
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To approximate 52! by hand, compute 54! and divide by 3000
Some time ago I gave a talk in which I showed that something unexpected happened with a deck of playing cards. I had some volunteers try it, and while they did so I talked about just how many orderings there are for 52 cards. I computed (an approximation to) $52!$ (52 factorial) by hand. It's not so hard - you just…
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