Top all-time · #177
DYNOMIGHT
Personal blog · dynomight.net · on HN as dynmscience
DYNOMIGHT is a personal blog at dynomight.net about science. Since 2021, 240 different Hacker News readers have linked it 515 times, most often “Avoid Ultrasonic Humidifiers”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-28, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 5 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Dynomight for data-driven deep dives, especially on air purifiers, humidifiers and LLM chess. Commenters value his statistical rigor and his findings that go beyond what academics and media have reported.
- Recommended for · 5 comments
- One commenter says the author digs deep, does the statistical due diligence and finds conclusions richer academics and media have missed. Other commenters call
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
science and existential angst
Most-linked posts?
- Avoid Ultrasonic Humidifiers14 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2021-04-18
- The health benefits of better air12 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2021-04-03
- Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier11 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2022-06-20
- The main thing about Phenylacetone meth is that there's so much of it9 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2021-10-28
- Heritability Puzzlers9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2025-08-07
- OK, I can partly explain the LLM chess weirdness now7 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2024-11-21
- First Principles on AI Scaling7 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2023-03-06
- The Cuboid: A DIY air purifier that's better than a box fan7 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2021-02-26
- In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2021-02-27
- Conspiracy theory: Electric cars make more air pollution than gas cars6 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2023-07-27
What Hacker News says?
As a reader, if I had to generalize; Dynomight is a SF-rationalist-substack-adjacent blogger with a good understanding of statistics. The 2 closest popular bloggers I associate him with are SSC and Gwern; both pretty popular on HN. I particularly loved his blogs on the homelessness[1] and drug[2] crisis in the US. He? digs deep, does the statistical due diligence and usually finds conclusions that richer-academics-m…
Comment linking /p2p-meth/
on “Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier”Submitted Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier as a story · 1474 points
HN discussionAgreed. There was an interesting post here recently that had this theory why churches work: "Eventually, you pick a relatively relaxed “normal” religion, complete with all the “God” stuff. You don’t believe everything they say is literally true, but our reality is strange and inexplicable, so who knows? There’s a great stable community and you talk about the broader themes of life and you’re healthier and happier. Y…
Comment linking /plans/
on “Why do you waste so much time on the internet?”Submitted Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful as a story · 971 points
HN discussionThe amount of text in books is surprisingly finite. My best estimate was that there are ~10¹³ tokens available in all books ( https://dynomight.net/scaling/#scaling-data ), which is less than frontier models are already being trained on. On the other hand, book tokens are probably much "better" than random internet tokens. Wikipedia for example seems to get much higher weight than other sources, and it's only ~3×10¹…
Comment linking /scaling/
on “Gemini 2.5 Flash”Submitted Plans you're not supposed to talk about as a story · 846 points
HN discussion"Make product worse, get money"? https://dynomight.net/worse/
Comment linking /worse/
on “Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled”Submitted My 16-month theanine self-experiment as a story · 817 points
HN discussionThe author is a part of that 'cult': - https://dynomight.net/air/ - https://dynomight.net/humidifiers/ So from context I think that the Hobo-Dyer projection and using bromine are both supposed to be superior to current common approaches, but, like ultrasonic humidifiers, normies don't accept these superior new facts even though the arguments for them are strong and flawless. I still don't get the point of the last t…
Comment linking /humidifiers/
on “Plans you're not supposed to talk about”Submitted Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate as a story · 801 points
HN discussionThat post ( https://dynomight.net/homeless/ ) uses HUD's counts from January 2023. There's a long delay with these—the counts are done each year in January but usually only published in December. The January 2024 counts are now available and do indeed show much higher levels: A total of 771k on Jan 2024 as opposed to 653k in Jan 2023 or 582k in 2022. But that post was done in July 2024, when that data wasn't availab…
Comment linking /homeless/
on “My 16-month theanine self-experiment”Submitted The health benefits of better air as a story · 693 points
HN discussionIncidentally, the author made an (counter-)review of air purifiers : https://dynomight.net/ikea-purifier/ I got the IKEA purifier with the activated charcoal filter after reading that
Comment linking /ikea-purifier/
on “My 16-month theanine self-experiment”Submitted New colors without shooting lasers into your eyes as a story · 568 points
HN discussionI did a bunch of tests with a similar filter (albeit comparing to a cheaper commercial purifier) https://dynomight.net/2020/12/15/some-real-data-on-a-DIY-box... It's crazy that commercial manufacturers usually don't even attempt to provide data like this to show that their products actually, you know, work.
Comment linking /2020/12/15/some-real-data-on-a-DIY-box-fan-air-purifier/
on “Dyson air purifier outperformed by cheap DIY box fan filter in Marketplace test”Submitted OK, I can partly explain the LLM chess weirdness now as a story · 524 points
HN discussionThis guy [1] is definitely an independent thinker and pretty regularly beats the "air quality" drum. Burning coal puts a massive amount of particulate matter into the air. That alone should disqualify it. 1: https://dynomight.net/air/
Comment linking /air/
on “Korean nuclear fusion reactor achieves 100M°C for 30 seconds”Submitted I don't like NumPy as a story · 488 points
HN discussionWell. They do affiliate and bigger Gorillas do affiliate. But they claim to do a more honest review. Well. Air cleaner. I do my review here without any affiliate link: Most DIY filters outclass commercial available filters: https://dynomight.net/better-DIY-air-purifier.html https://energy.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/uploads/Case-Study_DIY...
Comment linking /better-DIY-air-purifier.html
on “Big media publishers are inundating the web with subpar product recommendations”Submitted Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier (2022) as a story · 483 points
HN discussionthis page from the same site as the OP has links to more studies: https://dynomight.net/humidifiers/
Comment linking /humidifiers/
on “The health benefits of better air”Submitted How I learned to stop worrying and structure all writing as a list as a story · 479 points
HN discussionPretty close to being on the list. "Have a really smoky fire at home. Life cost: 1 day" Considering the close association of food, warmth, security and socialization with the habitual use of fire for at the very least several hundred thousand years of human history, is it really any surprise that some people still enjoy the practice? https://dynomight.net/air/#:~:text=Have%20a%20really,1%20day
Comment linking /air/
on “The health benefits of better air”Submitted So Much Blood as a story · 440 points
HN discussionI'd like to work on my writing skills. Some mix of nerdiness and personal Journaling. https://dynomight.net/ is a website that I'm quite inspired by, as it's a interesting mix of personal commentary ( https://dynomight.net/advice/ ) and deep data dives into e.g. homelessness and seed oils. My main barriers are 1) writing discipline and 2) some obsessive need to link/cite every claim I make. This results in me taking…
Comment linking /advice/
on “Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?”Submitted Let's stop counting centuries as a story · 410 points
HN discussionTo clarify, in summary so far LLM's can do a bit more than the inputs used for training. Example https://dynomight.net/chess/ as well as some coding solutions are a bit better than each input alone, although if the solution requires more than "a bit more" then LLMs start to hallucinate (spin the wheels). Time will tell if LLM's can jump this "a bit more" barrier? (I can not tell for sure yet, but the current knowled…
Comment linking /chess/
on “OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI”Submitted Experiments on a $50 DIY air purifier (2020) as a story · 409 points
HN discussion> P2P meth For those confused by the P2P acronym as I was, it's apparently a synthesis route that was developed in response to the crackdowns on OTC ephedrine products. It's apparently a lot more pure than the older stuff, at least according to https://dynomight.net/p2p-meth/
Comment linking /p2p-meth/
on “Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64”Submitted Old jokes as a story · 381 points
HN discussion
Linked by the same people?
- S
Scott Alexanderastralcodexten.com - D
DYNOMIGHT INTERNET NEWSLETTERdynomight.substack.com - Cconstruction-physics.comconstruction-physics.com
- S
Scott Alexanderastralcodexten.substack.com - MMatt Webbinterconnected.org
- Z
Zvi Mowshowitzthezvi.substack.com - F
Freddie deBoerfreddiedeboer.substack.com - A
Alexey Guzeyguzey.com