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How many radioactive bananas would you need to power a house?
I heard that bananas are radioactive. If they are radioactive, then they radiate energy. How many bananas would you need to power a house?
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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Lights and Shadows
Interactive article explaining how lights and shadows behave.
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GLP-1 drugs: An economic disruptor? (2024)
While Silicon Valley obsesses over AI, a weight-loss drug is quietly becoming the biggest economic disruptor since the internet. Here's why your job, investments, and future depend on understanding it
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The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated
Some skepticism of vitamin D skepticism
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Melatonin
Melatonin improves sleep, & sleep is valuable
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What happens when you touch a pickle to an AM radio tower
A few months ago, our AM radio hot dog experiment went mildly viral. That was a result of me asking my Dad 'what would happen if you ground a hot dog to one of your AM radio towers?' He didn't know, so one night on the way to my son's volleyball practice, we tested it. And it was awesome. There's a video and some…
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I changed my mind about nuclear waste
I’ve feared it. I’ve protested it. Now I’m hugging it
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Applied Category Theory
It just became a lot easier to learn about applied category theory, thanks to this free book: • Brendan Fong and David Spivak, Seven Sketches in Compositionality: An Invitation to Applied Cate…
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How to sequence your own DNA at home
I have now sequenced my own genome 5 times with an Oxford Nanopore Technologies MinION. This means collecting them from a swab, prepping them for sequencing, running them through a sequencer, then doing analysis over them.
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Helium is hard to replace
The war in Iran, and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, has unfortunately made us all familiar with details of the petroleum supply chain that we could formerly happily ignore.
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Please Fund More Science
Experts on the COVID-19 pandemic seem to think there are three ways out—that is, for life, health, and the economy to return roughly to normal. Either we get a vaccine good enough that R0 for the...
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AI is dramatically accelerating AI research
If acceleration compounds, the naive extrapolation implies superintelligence within a year
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Feynman’s Breakthrough: Disregard Others
Feynman (just off centre) at Wangerooge in 1987 I started my career as a theoretical physicist, and in the late-80s I co-organised a specialist workshop on a small island, Wangerooge, off the coast…
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Loss of cell identity drives human aging: Two new papers
That’s What Biological (Epigenetic) Aging Clocks Are Measuring
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CPM MagnaCut
CPM MagnaCut is a new stainless knife steel designed to be better than anything that has been available before. Is it a success?
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Breaking a Wine Glass in Python by Detecting the Resonant Frequency
Detecting the Resonant Frequency of an Object with
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Why the weak nuclear force is short range
The “range” of a force is a measure of the distance across which it can easily be effective. Some forces, including electric and magnetic forces and gravity, are long-range, able to cau…
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Consider working on genomics
Genomics needs more talented software engineers—here's why you should consider joining the field.
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Why do prime numbers make these spirals? (2019)
A curious pattern in polar plots with prime numbers, together with discussion of Dirichlet's theorem
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LLMs aren't world models
I believe that language models aren’t world models. It’s a weak claim — I’m not saying they’re useless, or that we’re done milking them. It’s also a fuzzy-sounding claim — with its trillion weights, who can prove that there’s something an LLM isn't a model of? But I hope to make my claim clear and persuasive enough…
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Six works of Computer Science-Fiction (2015)
Computer Science-Fiction 1 is not actually fiction. Instead, these are books of computer science and/or programming that when you read them you can’t quite believe that what they claim is reality. Indeed, very often works of Computer Science-Fiction push the limits of your understanding of just what constitutes the…
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All clocks are 30 seconds late
OK, this is going to sound crazy: I believe all clocks are 30 seconds late. Let's get a few things out of the way: this is neither about time zones, nor l...
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Why are D-sharp and E-flat considered to be two different notes?
Why do the black keys on the piano each have two different names? If the posts on r/musictheory are any indication, this is a persistent point of confusion, especially when music theory teachers ge…
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Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?
Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people? English adults under 60 who have watched the 1984 Ghostbusters movie are dying at twice the rate of people who have watched the 2021 Ghostbusters move the same age.And have been for six months. The chart may seem unbelievable or impossible but it is correct…
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There is one, and only one strain of SARS-CoV-2
The moment a preprint emerges describing a new patient isolate of SARS-CoV-2, with a change in the genome sequence, the world seems to explode with concern ...
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Raytracing a Black Hole
It's now clear I'm on a Black Hole binge (I can stop when I want, by the way). They're endlessly fascinating. My recent interest was in particular focused on simulating visualizations of the Schwarzschild geometry. I was preoccupied by the problem of generating a decent accurate representation of how the curvature of…