Top all-time · #12411
Dave Bacon
Personal blog · dabacon.org · on HN as da-baconsciencemath
Dave Bacon's personal blog at dabacon.org covers science and math. Since 2011, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 9 times. The last post was in 2019, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Dave Bacon's posts as sources: a story about Merkle's rejected public-key cryptography paper, a post pointing to a book on how abstract computer systems have become, and a rebuttal on teacher politics.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
What Hacker News says?
I wrote one of these! It was fun and cathartic, as you can imagine. But, because it's complicated, and because I wanted to play around with d3.js, instead of a long diatribe, I built a model of my brain to explain why I left: http://dabacon.org/pontiff/?p=10176
Comment linking /pontiff/?p=10176
on ““I Quit Academia,” an Important, Growing Subgenre of American Essays”Submitted The Universe as a Computer as a story · 49 points
HN discussionI'm surprised you find the Kekulé Problem not supporting that he liked science. I think of it more as pointing out that the unconsciousness has been ignored scientifically, but he certainly frames it as a question of science: "The unconscious is a biological system before it is anything else. To put it as pithily as possibly—and as accurately—the unconscious is a machine for operating an animal." "To repeat. The unc…
Comment linking /babel/2023/06/13/cormac/
on “Cormac McCarthy's Sideline: Freelance copy editor”Submitted Could Elsevier shut down arxiv.org? as a story · 27 points
HN discussionYeah me too. I wrote a post about why it hurt so much to lose this place along similar lines https://dabacon.org/pontiff/2024/08/16/requiem-for-the-livin...
Comment linking /pontiff/2024/08/16/requiem-for-the-living-computer-museum/
on “Ask HN: Why did no one save the Living Computers museum in Seattle?”Submitted Two Cultures in One of the Cultures as a story · 2 points
HN discussion"The actual teachers probably lean left, as they're educated (who generally tend to lean left)" Nope: http://dabacon.org/pontiff/?p=539
Comment linking /pontiff/?p=539
on “All 1,926 public school teachers in Providence fired”There's a great book that explains how abstract computer systems have become from the machinery: https://dabacon.org/caelifera/2017/02/05/book-overcomplicate...
Comment linking /caelifera/2017/02/05/book-overcomplicated-technology-at-the-limits-of-comprehension/
on “Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight”This is `the amazing story of how Merkle proposed public-key cryptography as a class project in grad school, and the professor described it as a “muddled terribly”, and then he submitted it to CACM, which rejected it because it was “outside of the mainstream of cryptographic thinking.”' [As related by Gilles Brassard via Aram Harrow. See http://dabacon.org/pontiff/?p=5728 ]
Comment linking /pontiff/?p=5728
on “Publishing a new idea”
