Top all-time · #25646
Matt J Weber
Personal blog · mjosefweber.medium.comhistoryscience
Matt J Weber's personal blog at mjosefweber.medium.com covers history and science. Since 2021, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 3 times. The last post was in 2021, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Medium essays by Matt J Weber on the history of computing, including early human 'computers' and the Turing debate, plus a linked piece on plutonium supply for NASA's rover missions. Commenters cite them as sources.
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.
What Hacker News says?
Plutonium was generated in reactors in the US but those were all shut down by the late 80s. It's not an easy thing to just mine or make more of there were whole reactors basically dedicated to just what we have left today. In fact we're kind of running out of the stuff for scientific missions, NASA only has enough for one RTG left according to reports. https://fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/pu50yc.html https://mjosefweber…
Comment linking /nasa-needs-plutonium-ea3bbaad8736
on “NASA's Perseverance rover sends stunning images”> https://mjosefweber.medium.com/the-first-computers-were-huma ... I cringe when I read ill-researched essays like these because it informs a relationship between women and computing that back then genuinely did not exist. For the vast, vast majority of women in the field of computing at this time, they were nothing more than glorified calculators. Yes, there were a few women scientists and mathematicians (by few, I…
Comment linking /the-first-computers-were-huma
on “Turing Oversold?”> I don't understand why Schmidhuber continues to ignore this crucial point. It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. But wait a minute, you might say, facts are facts. And if everyone had the time and resources to discover and digest every fact, your understanding would be the end of it. But everyone doesn't have time and resources. To compensate, w…
Comment linking /the-first-computers-were-human-and-mostly-women-b0d9bbff5a98
on “Turing Oversold?”