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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
Wild ramblings, raport from the field about choosing Vector Database for a particular project and a little bit of a rant about the current state of AI and how it's perceived, why human brains are a wonder of nature, and why it's far from 'thinking' and 'consciousness'.
Last week, the NTSB held the Asiana Flight 214 Investigative Hearing. On the 6th of July 2013, Asiana Flight 214, a scheduled passenger flight from Incheon, South Korea to San Francisco, CA, crashe…
Thanks for this. These are the sorts of clearheaded questions that must be asked if discussions of advanced and/or extraterrestrial technologies are to move beyond pleasant speculation and “get real.”
Some futurists try to foresee the future. Others attempt to shape it. Yet prolific science-fiction author and biochemist Isaac Asimov did both. Asimov not
Initial results from scanning through Excel files belonging to 600 published scientific papers.
Darwin: a genomics co-processor provides up to 15,000x acceleration on long read assembly Turakhia et al., ASPLOS’18 With the slow demise of Moore’s law, hardware accelerators are needed to m…
Beneath the utilitarian purpose of computation, computing is also a source of delight and wonder . Software is not just databases and mail merges or SaaS and spreadsheets; it's creative coding and simulated cities , code poetry and bulletin board systems . It's websites that dazzle and iPhone apps that make the heart…
How Tube Guitar Amplifiers Work
Douglas Self, clockwork, tram, Leveaux,
Stephen Wolfram shares what he learned in researching Ada Lovelace's life, writings about the Analytical Engine, and computation of Bernoulli numbers.
I’ve supervised a lot of great student projects in my nine years at MIT, but my inner nerdy teenager has never been as personally delighted by a project as it is right now. To…
Watch how IKEA expanded around the world in this data visualisation
There’s an old theory that memory is actually encoded in part in RNA. The argument is pretty simple: there’s no obvious way for all that sensory data to be captured in synapses as long …
Careful with those human analogies
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Abstract It has been a common practice in social psychology to publish only significant results. As a result, success rates in the published literature do not provide empirical evidence for the existence of a phenomenon. A recent meta-analysis suggested that ego-depletion is a much weaker effect than the published…
Note: This post departs from the general format used on this blog. That's because the post is not about a specific analysis I've done bu...
Editor’s Note 4/4/21: A few weeks after this article was published, a mysterious prion disease was identified in New Brunswick, Canada. I do not have to say that viruses have dominated every level of public conversation for the past year. Ancient and odd but relatively easy to talk about,
We're discussing a paper that demands attention...
On the benefits and lack of demerits of nicotine (research up to 2015)
The planet next door may be rough, but it has a lot of atmosphere
It was a dark day when Islam met the loudspeaker. All travelers to the Middle East discover that this normally self-assured religion gets insecure in the small hours of night and feels it has to rehearse its foundational beliefs, in public, at 190 dB.
Experimenting with JPEG compressing text.
Why are election polls often inaccurate? Why is racism wrong? Why are your assumptions often mistaken? The answers to all these questions and to many others have a lot to do with the non-ergodicity…
Large language models are valuable research assistants, especially when they refuse to follow instructions.
