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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
I’ve been in the AI space since ChatGPT first dropped. I’ve toyed around with a lot of Language Models, built random side projects, built a couple from scratch and I’ve spent hours looking at the math behind it all.
The first entry on this blog was 20 years ago yesterday, first substantive one was 20 years ago tomorrow (first one that drew attacks on me as an incompetent was two days later). Back when I starte…
It’s typically 10 μm thick and 400 mm wide, giving it an aspect ratio of 40000 in that dimension, and rolls are commonly some ten meters in length, for an aspect ratio of 1 000 000; heavy-duty versions can reach 30 μm or more. Despite their thinness, foils of 25 μm or more are impermeable to oxygen, water, and light…
In machine learning, the term manifold is thrown around a lot—in fact, there’s even a branch of machine learning dealing with learning the structure of manifolds. Said branch is aptly named manifold learning . Inspired by fantastic visualizations of shapelet mining algorithms , this post aims to give a visual…
Spend enough time in the tech world and you will sooner or later find that itis a common article of faith that comput...
Far below the Antarctic circle, I watch a woman cry real tears because she can’t get gluten-free toast.
Queueing theory is the scientific study of waiting in line. It can apply to familiar lines like those at the grocery store or bank but also to things like web s
Some claims that test scores don’t predict college success don’t add up.
Ben Recht got my attention with a tweet about his blog post "The Higgs discovery did not take place.” I’m generally a fan of Ben’s writing, but I think he’s off base on a number of issues, and I’ll explain why. [Updated Oct 23rd, 2024] Ben's …
Why did a huge alcohol RCT get cancelled? A strange story of science, academia, bureaucratic maneuvering, ambition, politics, capitalism, the deep state, secret emails, and slippery ethical slopes.
aka: how I “accidentally” discovered what I already suspected: optimization methods are at the heart of landing rockets.
An adventure of the Southern Appalachian Space Agency, by Travis Goodspeed <travis at radiantmachines.com>, as presented at Summercon 2013...
Visualizing the exponential growth of COVID-19 across the world.
I've started learning about spectrum analysis a long time ago at university, but failed to gain a true insight in how it works under the hood. For me, it was just some magical math formulas I had to memorize and know about. I knew the theory but it didn't really click .
This package provides an essential feature to LaTeX that has been missing for too long. It adds a coffee stain to your documents. A lot of time can be saved by printing stains directly on the page rather than adding it manually.
Millions die prematurely from local air pollution, but we can reduce this number significantly.
I was recently discussing laser etching with an engineer/font-designer friend of mine, and I wanted to show him a picture of some really good laser etching on a particular piece of optical equipment.
Last week, I wrote about the mindset that computer systems can be understood, and behaviors can be explained, if we’re willing to dig deep enough into the stack of abstractions our software is built atop. Some of the ensuing discussion on Twitter and elsewhere lead me to write this followup, in which I want to run…
I was staring at a bonfire on a beach the other day and realized that I didn’t understand anything about fire and how it works. (For example: what determines its color?) So I looked up some s…
To celebrate being alive for a billion seconds, Daniel Bruin built a machine with 100 gears with a 10-to-1 gear ratio…meaning that the overall gear ratio is a g
Shane Frederick points us to this article from 1999 , “Stereotype susceptibility: Identity salience and shifts in quantitative performance,” about which he writes:
Albert Einstein used to say that he went to his office at the Institute for Advanced Study “just to have the privilege of walking home with Kurt Gödel.” The two would meet at Einstein’s home each day between 10 and 11 and undertake the half-hour walk to the institute. At 1 or 2 in the afternoon they’d walk back…
Light pollution is a rapidly growing problem. Most of the population in the United States cannot see the Milky Way. When I look up at the sky from Venice, California, I can see about 20 stars. The rest of the galaxy is hidden by an orange haze of light pollution. This guide talks about a method called ETTR or…
Some years ago, you blogged about a research article by Hasan and colleagues (2013) .
Links:Google paper in NatureNew York Times articleIBM paper and blog post responding to Google’s announcementBoaz Barak’s new post: “Boaz’s inferior classical inferiority FA…
This guide teaches you how to make pyramid salt crystals at home. Follow these simple steps to turn regular salt into premium artisan salt.
[I am not a sleep specialist. Please consult with one before making any drastic changes or trying to treat anything serious.] Van Geiklswijk et al describe supplemental melatonin as “a chrono…
