Top all-time · #10592
Raghuveer Parthasarathy
Personal blog · eighteenthelephant.comsciencewriting
Raghuveer Parthasarathy writes The Eighteenth Elephant, a personal blog at eighteenthelephant.com about science and writing. Since 2019, 7 different Hacker News readers have linked it 7 times, most often “How much power can we expect from rainfall?”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-09, 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 these posts on physics and computing: one on emergence, contrasting software's abstract properties with hardware's physical instantiation, and one on why few people major in computer science.
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.
Raghuveer Parthasarathy
Most-linked posts?
- How much power can we expect from rainfall?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-02-15
What Hacker News says?
The distinction I'm making is not between different types of atomic motions, but between properties of an algorithm (eg whether it meets a spec) and the physical instantiation of the algorithm running on some computer: ie software vs hardware. Hardware is subject to physics (cosmic rays etc), but software is not. There are lots of examples like this where the subject of interest occurs at different levels of emergen…
Comment linking /2013/08/02/167/
on “Pushed Around by the Stars”Submitted How much power can we expect from rainfall? as a story · 175 points
HN discussionI think this article may be outdated. It was published in 2017. By 2019, the NYTimes was publishing articles like this, about the shortage of spaces in classes for people interested in CS: so popular students literally could't sign up. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/technology/computer-scien... Here's an article from 2023, about a 12x increase (!) in CS enrollments at UC Berkeley from 2011 to 2021. The trend at…
Comment linking /2023/02/12/10-double-the-number-of-computer-science-majors-20-goto-10/
on “Why do so few people major in computer science?”Submitted Pushed Around by the Stars as a story · 34 points
HN discussionSubmitted Can the teardrops from reading bad science writing generate electricity? as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSubmitted Science, Small Groups and Stochasticity as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Online courses, supply and demand, and academic integrity as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
