Top all-time · #8390
Kirsten Hacker
Personal blog · kirstenhacker.wordpress.comwritingscienceculture
Kirsten Hacker's personal blog at kirstenhacker.wordpress.com covers writing, science and culture. Since 2019, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 319 times, most often “High-energy experiment is generally statistically unsound”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-07-05, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for critiques of high-energy physics research and its statistics, plus posts on neutron stars and gravitational waves. Commenters are divided between praising its reasoning and calling it crackpottery.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
If you have landed here, perhaps you know me from Quora, Medium, or YouTube. I was a physicist for twenty years, but today I am the author of several unusual novels, an audio book, and one soothing, yet illuminating blog with musings about science, philosophy, and culture. paypal.me/kirstenhacker
Most-linked posts?
- High-energy experiment is generally statistically unsound2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-10-07
- The Vampire Octopus Content Generator2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-08-15
- Black hole detritus has gotten all over everything2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-10-08
- Mr. Neutron2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-10-28
- Thought Experiments – what you learned in school was probably wrong2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-01-17
- Blue Skies2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-10-20
What Hacker News says?
The idea that half of Twitter's accounts are bots is not new: https://gizmodo.com/how-many-social-media-users-are-real-peo... (written in 2018) Another older article puts the issue into a larger social context and makes some sloppy estimates: "Since Twitter’s yearly revenue is between 2 and 3 billion dollars — that is as much as 50 dollars per potential customer on average and that doesn’t count what people are spen…
Comment linking /2019/08/05/the-fake-economies-of-the-internet/
on “Analysis of 200M tweets discussing coronavirus suggests 45%-60% come from bots”Submitted Signs of the Times as a story · 43 points
HN discussion>You imply there were no benefits from lhc? I have overtly stated as much, in as public a way as I had access to at the time. I don't care if it's "not incredibly expensive per scientist" -it is a wasted effort, and an awful lot of what gets published (with 1000 "authors") as being bullshit. I've also seen the lifestyle and read the "results" of both experimental high energy and the theorists: it's basically a cargo…
Comment linking /2019/09/29/the-walrus-and-the-carpenter/
on “CERN's Future Circular Collider (FCC) Conceptual Design Report [pdf]”Submitted High-energy experiment is generally statistically unsound as a story · 29 points
HN discussionAh, and that explains the neutron star skepticism [0] too. [0] https://kirstenhacker.wordpress.com/2019/08/27/neutron-nonse...
Comment linking /2019/08/27/neutron-nonsense/
on “Signs of the Times”Submitted Dirac, Penrose, and Wolfram as a story · 27 points
HN discussion> Indeed, but if you ignore much of the crack-pottery She claims to have studied physics for twenty years and have a PhD in accelerator physics. If true (and she seems too well-informed to be lying), her crack-pottery is at the very least well-informed enough to likely contain many useful insights and views worth considering. Especially regarding physicist culture . There is a page where she shares a few of her nove…
Comment linking /2019/07/30/reviews/
on “High-energy experiment is generally statistically unsound”Submitted A Publishing Industry Mystery Is Unraveling as a story · 17 points
HN discussionReading this felt like a breath of fresh air. Her blog is really worthwhile to read, also this article about the first picture of a black hole: https://kirstenhacker.wordpress.com/2019/08/24/signs-of-the-... I'm not qualified to judge either way, but I like the style of her reasoning very much.
Comment linking /2019/08/24/signs-of-the-times/
on “High-energy experiment is generally statistically unsound”Submitted Weary Light as a story · 16 points
HN discussionEdit 2: You are Kirsten, right? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22083351 If so using third person is extremely deceptive writing in my opinion. Change it to first person: “When I, with a PhD in physics, writes about it first and with much more background knowledge...“. “Writes about it first” is also plain wrong, it’s not like the physicists aren’t arguing and articles already exist https://www.heise.de/tp/feat…
Comment linking /2019/09/05/blue-skies/
on “Gravitational Waves: The Silent Disaster”Submitted Homelessness as a Symptom as a story · 15 points
HN discussionPrior to her post-doctoral work, she wrote her thesis on the synchronization of particle beams with light, but it didn't have anything to do with mysticism. This contains a sample of some of that work: https://kirstenhacker.wordpress.com/posts-deleted-by-quora/
Comment linking /posts-deleted-by-quora/
on “Weary Light”Submitted Maxwell's Equations in Wonderland as a story · 9 points
HN discussionThis post on of Proteins, People, and Particles contains the text of an invited talk given at the data science company: https://idalab.de/blog The original slides are in this post: https://kirstenhacker.wordpress.com/2020/03/02/idalabs-semin...
Comment linking /2020/03/02/idalabs-seminar-march-12/
on “Of Proteins, People, and Particles”Submitted Acceleration Towards a Bottleneck – A Theory of History as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSince this is hackernews, maybe this is the right place for this question: Yesterday evening, someone deleted two posts from my WordPress blog. I assume that it was a hacker who didn't appreciate my apostatic criticism of the scientific community. The two posts (out of 160) included an early version of this one and another post that once circulated widely on Twitter ( https://kirstenhacker.wordpress.com/2019/09/29/t…
Comment linking /2019/09/29/the-walrus-and-the-carpenter/
on “Disentanglement – simple things made complex”Submitted Why Solar Systems and Galaxies Are Flat as a story · 5 points
HN discussionmy problem is that I don't know what sort of organization has targeted me. https://kirstenhacker.wordpress.com/2020/12/24/authorial-qui...
Comment linking /2020/12/24/authorial-quirks-poor-mans-toolset/
on “Public databases of novels for forensic linguistics tests?”Submitted Engineering Illiteracy as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Of People, Proteins, and Particles as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Evolution of Group Delusion as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Linux vs. Windows (A Romance) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Neutrino Nonsense as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Forever Young – irresponsible speculation about magnets, nicotine, and vitamin A as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Clowns of the Botpocalypse as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted How do people publish multiple novels in a single year? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Sleepng Soundly as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Peak Oil, Peak Phosphate as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Real vs. Fake Feminists as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
