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Why it's so hard to build a jet engine
Civilization's toughest technical challenges are those that require extraordinary (and constantly improving) performance to be delivered at a low cost.
Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
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Testing the F-35C Tailhook
Welcome to the blog. As a way to kick things off, here’s a single-page version of my thread on the F-35C tailhook.
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Visualizing World War II
If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you’ll know that maps and history are two of my favorite things. I love history because I love learning about the vast panoply of the human …
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You need to know what right-half-plane zeros are
Why some systems -- as a consequence of their intrinsic dynamics -- require a control action that first pushes them the wrong way and makes things worse before it gets better.
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Homemade 6 GHz pulse compression radar
Designing a modern pulse compression radar that uses digital signal processing.
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Open Problems in Robotics
Robotics is one of those things the business funny papers regularly wonder about; it seems like consumer robotics is a revolutionary trillion dollar market which is perpetually 20-years away -more…
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Sci-Hub and Alexandra Basic Information
I decided to make a quick summary of facts about Sci-Hub and myself, because in our times you cannot fully trust articles published in media, Wikipedia pages. Well, they do present facts about Sci-…
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LED lighting badly suppresses human melatonin production at night
Yes, it’s a spicy title. Yes, I plan to back it with what I consider very reasonable evidence of the claims, in the form of a lot of research papers. I would simply ask that you read to the end before deciding I’ve lost it.
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What does the cerebellum do?
Hint: It's Not Just Balance
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If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it
[This is a guest post by Grant Sanderson. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] A sentiment echoing throughout the mathematics communit…
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The SpaceX Starship is a big deal
Part of my series on common misconceptions in space journalism. Now available in audio form. SpaceX has been working on some variant of the Big Falcon Rocket for almost a decade, with a publicly an…
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BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of
I came to the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) show this year with my Dad to learn more about time in broadcast and live production. I was expecting to learn more about grandmaster clocks, AV sync, timing in protocols like Dante, Livewire, AES67, and more—and I have. But then on the first day here I found…
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Autoresearch on an old research idea
Yogesh Kumar's personal website
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Vitamin D, part 2: Shannon's story
How much Vitamin D should I take? This is still the looming question, and it’s time to address it. First, though, imagine that someone in a public forum online asked me, “How much metoprolol (a…
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Why time seems to pass faster as we age
1/ I’ve been mega-obsessed with this feeling. A year as a 36-year-old seems so much shorter as compared to when I was a kid or even as a teen. It seems cosmically unfair – we have fewer years to live, and each year flies by faster. 2/ But, why is that happening? My tentative conclusion is that… Read More
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The hidden engineering of runways
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] September 2025 was an unusually bad month for runway overruns in the US. On the night of September 24th, an Embraer 145 with 53 people on board landed long at the Roanoke-Blacksburg Regional Airport in Virginia, overshooting the
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The Los Angeles Aqueduct Is Wild
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] On the northern edge of Los Angeles, fresh water spills down two stark concrete chutes perched on the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, a place simply called The Cascades. It’s a deceptively simple-looking finish line: the
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Nootropics
Notes on nootropics I tried, and my experiments
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20 Years Later
Almost exactly twenty years ago I started writing a short article about the problems with string theory. I had been thinking about doing this for quite a while, and the timing of entering the twent…
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Some insects I found inside dried Turkish figs from Trader Joe’s
During an online wasp identification course I participated in several weeks ago, there was a fun discussion about whether commercially-produced figs contained fig wasps (Agaonidae, in the Chalcidoidea). Opinions varied, plus some asserted, as do many internet pages, that even if wasps were once insi
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But good sir, what is electricity?
A quick look at the physics of conductors, insulators, and electric charges.
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The Mathocalypse
More Updates (Oct. 12): Jeffrey Ketchersid has used Claude Code agents to show that BusyBeaver(10) exceeds Graham’s number, beating the previous best result that BB(13) does so. In response t…