Top all-time · #9153
Joe Antognini
Personal blog · joe-antognini.github.io · on HN as antogniniscienceai
Joe Antognini's personal blog at joe-antognini.github.io covers science and ai. Since 2015, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 25 times, most often “Consciousness is not computation”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-01-03, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Joe Antognini's posts on the James-Stein estimator and day length variations. One commenter also flagged a missing factor in the daylight post's sample transformation section.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Consciousness is not computation3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-06-18
- How fast the days are getting longer (2023)2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-03-31
- What are the progenitors of Type Ia supernovae?2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-08-20
- Understanding Stein's Paradox (2021)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-01-03
- Apples in a Spacecraft (2014)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-10-10
What Hacker News says?
Thank you! I did consider writing for astrobites in grad school, but never had the time. :-( I have written a few things about dynamics on my blog, though (that was my subfield): https://joe-antognini.github.io/
Comment linking /
on “Milky Way’s Black Hole Just Flared, Growing 75 Times as Bright for a Few Hours”Submitted How fast the days are getting longer (2023) as a story · 613 points
HN discussionI went through the math on the expected value of a vote in the last election [1], and if you're in a swing state I found that the expected value of your vote is surprisingly high. I estimated that a voter in Pennsylvania in 2020 would have had an expected value of about $3000. Of course, as with the lottery, the probability of a payoff is extremely low. [1]: https://joe-antognini.github.io/misc/decisive-vote
Comment linking /misc/decisive-vote
on “White House deletes tweet after Twitter adds 'context' note”Submitted Consciousness is not computation as a story · 282 points
HN discussionI'm vaguely for pan-psychism as in, it sounds good but I haven't thought about it for even 5 minutes. But I'm more interested in the version where all matter has some kind of proto-consciousness. Still, no idea how it's suposed to work in detail: how can it make a difference whether a particle is part of an information-processing system? There is an infinitude of mappings between physical systems and mathematical fu…
Comment linking /ml/consciousness
on “Human sperm cooperate on the competitive pathway to fertilization: study”Submitted Understanding Stein's Paradox (2021) as a story · 103 points
HN discussionLast year I made an interactive plot so that you can see how much the length of a day changes over the course of the year as a function of latitude. It goes through the math of how you can make the calculation. You can check it out here: https://joe-antognini.github.io/astronomy/daylight
Comment linking /astronomy/daylight
on “Sinusoidal Sunlight”Submitted Learning to Play Tic-Tac-Toe with Jax as a story · 4 points
HN discussionOrbital mechanics can be counterintuitive. There was a fairly basic orbital mechanics problem that caused some debate among physicists back in the 1970s. The problem went like this: You are in a spacecraft orbiting the Earth. You distribute a bushel of apples throughout spacecraft so that they are at rest with respect to the spacecraft. After a long time, where do the apples end up? Hannes Alfvén (more famous for Al…
Comment linking /astronomy/apples-in-a-spacecraft
on “In orbit you have to slow down to speed up”Submitted Thought experiments on the computational theory of consciousness as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThe headline here is a bit of an overstatement. Nothing in the original paper is casting doubt on Type Ia supernovae as reliable standard candles. It is definitely an embarrassment that we still don't know the mechanism by which Sne Ia occur, but empirically their luminosities can be calibrated well enough that the accelerating expansion of the universe is not in doubt. However, to determine the nature of dark energ…
Comment linking /astronomy/typeia-progenitors
on “Supernova’s messy birth casts doubt on reliability of astronomical yardstick”Submitted Consciousness Is Not Computation as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThere's a (relatively) famous problem in astrodynamics called "Apples in a Spacecraft". I wrote a blog post about it a little while back [1], but the gist of the problem is this: Suppose you're in a rectangular spacecraft orbiting around the Earth and you release a bushel of apples so that they are uniformly distributed and stationary relative to your spacecraft. If you don't disturb the apples, what will their long…
Comment linking /astronomy/apples-in-a-spacecraft
on “The Sideways Tide”Submitted Understanding Stein's Paradox as a story · 3 points
HN discussionA brief summary of the paper for the layperson: One of the big open questions in astronomy is what causes Type Ia supernovae. We know that it involves a white dwarf exceeding the Chandrasekhar limit, but there are two competing models for how this happens. In one of these models (the "single degenerate model") there is a companion red giant and gas from the red giant is slowly accreted onto the white dwarf until it…
Comment linking /astronomy/typeia-progenitors
on “Double detonation: from Type a Ia supernova explosion to its supernova remnant”Submitted What are the progenitors of Type Ia supernovae? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionNice. I notice that the author has some other interesting posts. I like this one on the James–Stein estimator [0] and this one [1] on day length variations. [0] https://joe-antognini.github.io/machine-learning/steins-para... [1] https://joe-antognini.github.io/astronomy/daylight By the way I think there's a missing factor of rho in the numerator in [1] in the sample transformation section. Should be rho^2
Comment linking /astronomy/daylight
on “Learning to Play Tic-Tac-Toe with Jax”Submitted How Fast the Days Are Getting Longer (2023) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Understanding Stein's Paradox as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted How Fast the Days Are Getting Longer as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted What is the expected value of a decisive vote? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Reflections on the Google AI Residency One Year On as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Apples in a Spacecraft as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Apples in a Spacecraft (2014) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
