Top all-time · #10313
Dan Elton
Personal blog · moreisdifferent.comscienceai
Dan Elton's personal blog at moreisdifferent.com covers science and ai. Since 2016, 7 different Hacker News readers have linked it 7 times, most often “Why physicists still use Fortran”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-05-16, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Commenters link this blog's older post debunking exclusion-zone claims, which is about the science behind those claims. The other comments cite no posts and only discuss the threads' topics.
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.
Dan Elton — scientist and builder working across biosecurity, AI safety, genetics, and human longevity.
Most-linked posts?
- Why physicists still use Fortran2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-12-18
What Hacker News says?
I used to maintain a large FORTRAN codebase - it seemed like every time new grad students showed up, everyone got a wise idea to re-build everything in a modern language. This question is revisited a lot, but the general consensus has been that FORTRAN is fast, simple, easy to understand and code, and the compilers used are super optimized (Intel's FORTRAN compiler was really a gem - it managed to do a ton of automa…
Comment linking /2015/07/16/why-physicsts-still-use-fortran/
on “Rewriting Fortran Software in Rust”Submitted Why physicists still use Fortran (2015) as a story · 373 points
HN discussionhttp://moreisdifferent.com/2015/11/19/debunking-exclusion-zo...
Comment linking /2015/11/19/debunking-exclusion-zone-water/
on “Chemists discover water microdroplets spontaneously produce hydrogen peroxide”Submitted Why physicists still use Fortran as a story · 205 points
HN discussionMy point was that RL/DL is being used like some kind of massive hammer to hit all the nails. Cognition requires different, specialized, energy-efficient tools. > consciousness All talk about this is premature and "pre-science", before we figure out more basic, fundamental things like object storage and recall from memory, object recognition from sensory input, concept representation and formation, the exact mechanis…
Comment linking /2017/09/hinton-whats-wrong-with-CNNs
on “Why traditional reinforcement learning will probably not yield AGI [pdf]”Submitted Why physicists still use Fortran (2015) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Moore's Law – Kurzweil vs. Thiel (2015) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
