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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts said Richard Feynman. Feynman had a Nobel prize in physics. He was a remarquable educator: his lecture notes are still popular. He foresaw nanotechnology and quantum computing. He is credited with identifying the cause of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. There is…
It’s this simple: Do you want what’s behind one door or the other nine?
In 2013 I decided to quit my career in astrophysics, move back “home” and become a data scientist. The blog post I wrote about my decision was probably my best read publication as a professional astronomer and it was moving to read all the reactions from people who were struggling with similar decisions. I meant every…
In 1949, in a festschrift devoted to Einstein , Kurt Gödel published a very short but profound paper titled “A Remark About the Relati...
Throughout history, societies have existed with far less coercion than ours, and while these societies have had far less consumer goods and what modernity calls “efficiency,” they also have had far…
If you pull up a tuner app on your phone and play an A note on a piano, the tuner will say ~440 hz. Do the same thing on a violin's A note and you'll also get 440 hz.
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
“Study hard what interests you the most.”
Before we get nerd sniped by the shiny engineering details, ask the only question that matters. Why compute in orbit? Why should a watt or a flop 250 miles up be more valuable than one on the surface? What advantage justifies moving something as mundane as matrix multiplication into LEO?
Great. The fusion hype is bad enough already. Now its resurgence is going to interrupt the series of posts I’m in the middle of publishing in order for this post to be “timely.”
The human eye is very sensitive; but can we see a single photon? The answer is yes: sensors in the retina can respond to a single photon. But neural filters only allow a signal to pass to the brain to trigger a conscious response when at least about five to nine arrive within less than 100 ms. If we could consciously…
How the Darwin-Gödel Machine rewrites its own code to improve, and whether we can trust it
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
All large numbers are large, but some are larger than others
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] “The big black stacks of the Illium Works of the Federal Apparatus Corporation spewed acid fumes and soot over the hundreds of men and women who were lined up before the red-brick employment office.” That’s the first line of one
Would you like to win one hundred million bucks from Elon Musk? Carbon capture (CC) is all the rage these days, with dozens of companies springing up to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and help stab…
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
You may have heard of Christian Bök. You may have read about him on this very blog if you’ve been hanging out here long enough. Perhaps you were even one of the very select few to witness the seminal talk I gave back in 2016 [1] —“ScArt: or, How to Tell When You’ve Finished Fucking”— which climaxed with a glowing…
Why are the loops on roller coasters never circular?
See A Satellite Tonight is my most successful side project so far, with 5 million users since launch in 2019. It's been entirely a solo project, and I've used it as a proving ground for a bunch of tech that I wanted to learn. It took dozens of APIs and services to put together the experience I wanted: The front page…
(1) The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] Niagara Falls is one of the most spectacular waterfalls in the world. With a vertical drop of more than 50 meters or 164 feet and a flow rate that often exceeds 2800 cubic meters per second or 100,000 cubic feet per second, it’s
3 magnesium self-experiments on magnesium ʟ-threonate and magnesium citrate.
a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things
When I was a child, my father would take me trout fishing, and I spent hours marveling from the riverbank at the trouts’ ability to, seemingly effortlessly, h
