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Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
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What Is Entropy?
I wrote a little book about entropy; here’s the current draft: • What is Entropy? If you see typos and other mistakes, or have trouble understanding things, please let me know! An altern…
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“Pigeon Neck” Illusion (2014)
An interactive demonstration of the “Pigeon Neck” Illusion
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The Remarkable Brain Waves of High Level Meditators [video]
What’s going on in the brains of people who meditate? Anecdotal evidence suggests that meditation does something to people’s minds and bodies…quiets and calms t
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Planes are still decades away from displacing most bird jobs
Note: Parts of this essay were written by GPT-3, so it might contain untrue facts. Introduction Many of my friends are extremely excited by planes, rockets, and helicopters. They keep showing me videos of planes flying at enormous speed, rockets taking off from the ground while creating fiery infernos around them, and…
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Get the location of the ISS using DNS
I love DNS esoterica. Weird little things that you can shove in the global directory to be distributed around the world instantly(ish). Domain names, like www.example.com usually resolve to servers. As much as we think of "the cloud" as being some intangible morass of ethereal Turing-machines floating in probability…
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Soylent: What Happened When I Stopped Eating For 2 Weeks
Tim Ferriss Intro Hundreds of people have asked me about Soylent, a controversial Silicon Valley team trying to replace food with a grayish liquid. “Does it really deliver all the nutrients the human body needs?” “Is it safe?” “Why hasn’t anyone tried this before?” [Hint: they have] And most often: “What do you think…
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Does creatine make you smarter?
And why does the brain use creatine anyway?
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Bird brains (2023)
A kea parrot in New Zealand learned to drag traffic cones onto a highway so cars would stop and humans would feed it. That sent me down a rabbit hole on how we actually measure bird intelligence.
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How pharmaceutical industry financial modelers think about rare diseases
How does industry decide whether curing your disease would be profitable, and how can you convince them it will be?
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Can you use a magnifying glass and moonlight to light a fire? (2016)
A magnifying glass concentrates light on a small spot. As many mischevious kids can tell you, a magnifying glass as small as a square inch in size can collect enough light to start a fire. A little Googling will tell you that the Sun is 400,000 times brighter than the Moon, so all we need is a 400,000-square-inch…
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Why haven't quantum computers factored 21 yet?
Craig Gidney's computer science blog
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GPT-4 and professional benchmarks: the wrong answer to the wrong question
OpenAI may have tested on the training data. Besides, human benchmarks are meaningless for bots.
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π in Other Universes
How the value of π depends on the definition of distance.
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Candle Flame Oscillations as a Clock
Todays candles have been optimized for millenia not to flicker. But it turns out when we bundle three of them together, we can undo all of these optimizations and the resulting triplet will start t…
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Impacts of lack of sleep
Sleep is important. People vastly underestimate the extent to which not sleeping is harmful, viewing it as a valid trade off for productivity and overlooking all of the longterm negative effects.
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What really happened at the Millennium Tower?
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] The Millennium Tower is the tallest residential building in San Francisco, with 58 stories above the ground and 419 luxury condominium units. The tower opened to residents in 2009, but even before construction was finished, engi
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A digestion of the Jacobian conjecture counterexample
The notorious Jacobian conjecture can be formulated concretely over the complex numbers as follows. Conjecture 1 (Jacobian Conjecture) Let $latex {F:{\bf C}^n \rightarrow {\bf C}^n}&fg=000000$ …
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NIST was 5 μs off UTC after last week's power cut
If you were 5 microseconds late today, blame it on NIST. Their facility in Boulder Colorado just had its power cut for multiple days. After a backup generator failed, their main ensemble clock lost track of UTC, or Universal Time Coordinated. But even if you used the NTP timing servers they run, they were never off by…
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Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History
This post celebrates influential papers that shaped technology and communication. Their foundational concepts inspire continued innovation, highlighting the importance of understanding our roots fo…
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Go Pro on a soaring eagle [video]
What does it feel like to soar majestically like an bird? Maybe something like this video, shot with a camera strapped to the back of an eagle flying near Chamo
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Photos of the An-225 Mriya – the world’s largest aircraft
An-225 Mriya (which is referred to Dream from Ukrainian) is the heaviest airlift cargo aircraft ever taken off in the sky. The maximum takeoff weight makes 640 tons. An-225 was designed, due to the necessity to create the air transport system for the Soviet reusable Space Shuttle Buran. This is the…
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The Thrill of Flying the SR-71 Blackbird
Aviator's love for the SR-71
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Movies every physics lover should watch (2020)
Biographical, time travel, quantum physics and philosophy films
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What happens when you try to publish a failure to replicate in 2015/2016
Anyone who has talked to me in the last year would have heard me complain about my 8-times-failure-to-replicate which nobody wants to publis...