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The Curious Wavefunction
Personal blog · wavefunction.fieldofscience.comsciencephilosophyhistory
The Curious Wavefunction is a personal blog at wavefunction.fieldofscience.com about science, philosophy and history. Since 2010, 22 different Hacker News readers have linked it 24 times, most often “On AlphaGo, chemical synthesis and the rise of the intuition machines”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-06-17, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link The Curious Wavefunction for posts on Feynman, Nobel prizes, genomics hype, and origin-of-life chemistry. Comments mostly cite or link the posts as support for their own points.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Musings on science, history, philosophy and literature
Most-linked posts?
- On AlphaGo, chemical synthesis and the rise of the intuition machines2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-04-24
What Hacker News says?
Given that his sister Joan was an accomplished scientist in her own right, and they got along well, I don't think your comment is accurate. > “During the conference I was staying with my sister in Syracuse. I brought the paper home and said to her, “I can’t understand these things that Lee and Yang are saying. It’s all so complicated.” > “No,” she said, “what you mean is not that you can’t understand it, but that yo…
Comment linking /2017/04/richard-feynmans-sister-joans-advice-to.html
on “Richard Feynman's blackboard at the time of his death (1988)”Submitted What is chemical intuition? as a story · 50 points
HN discussionVery nice, thanks. Here's a somewhat related article too: http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/science/article_4b79fc5d-4d5e... On the other hand, it sounds like VS isn't exactly at 100% production yet: http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2010/04/will-virtual-... But getting there. Based on your HN profile, I defer to you obviously. Curious subject. E.g., based on the wikipedia article, I had no idea the range that Ber…
Comment linking /2010/04/will-virtual-screening-ever-work.html
on “An interview by a 7th grader”Submitted Fraud, not error, accounts for most scientific retractions as a story · 37 points
HN discussionThat's a terrible analogy, and here are two good links on why: http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2015/03/cancer-genomi... http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/reading-the-human-geno...
Comment linking /2015/03/cancer-genomics-and-technological.html
on “Joining a Different YC”Submitted Unifiers and diversifiers in physics, chemistry and biology as a story · 25 points
HN discussionThe setup of opposing forces leads one to think in terms of entropy ("the fog of war", the manifold of possible mistakes, etc etc).. Then there's that story about the break even point between French and Mamluks iirc? (And what was the break even point between LGA and the Coalition?) Somewhere in between we might characterize tech debt; rococo doesn't turn to rubble overnight, & most of it is still around. Or maybe t…
Comment linking /2015/02/derek-lowe-to-world-beware-of-von.html?m=1
on “Who can claim Aristotle?”Submitted On AlphaGo, chemical synthesis and the rise of the intuition machines as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI thought this was interesting: "Both Betzig and Moerner made their original pioneering discoveries in industry - Moerner when he was working at IBM in San Jose and Betzig when he was working in his own private company" - http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2014/10/the-2014-nobe...
Comment linking /2014/10/the-2014-nobel-prize-in-chemistry-and.html
on “The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2014”Submitted The three horsemen of the machine learning apocalypse as a story · 4 points
HN discussion1. That graph completely omits the quality of the sequence data being generated (hint: it's pretty terrible). 2. Hyping up cheaper sequencing the way you are is nothing more than what Sydney Brenner referred to as "low-input, high-throughput, no-output biology" (video source: http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/reading-the-human-geno... ). Also see: http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2015/03/cancer-genomi... 3…
Comment linking /2015/03/cancer-genomics-and-technological.html
on “Verge Genomics (YC S15) Wants to Cure Neurodegenerative Diseases with Algorithms”Submitted Environmentalism is not climate change; climate change is not environmentalism as a story · 3 points
HN discussionMy comment is about the building blocks . We seem to find amino acids everywhere . It seems like once conditions exist that they can form, they DO form. We don't have any equivalent building block which is anywhere nearly so ubiquitous. In addition, these building blocks are reversible within 3kcal/mol. Life requires reversibility. http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2008/10/unbearable-he... We have no other buil…
Comment linking /2008/10/unbearable-heat-capacity-of-being.html
on “The search for extraterrestrial life as we don’t know it”Submitted Kurt Gödel's Open World as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe author actually makes a pretty convincing case that Feynman wasn't, in fact, sexist. I asked for clarification here: http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2014/07/richard-feynm...
Comment linking /2014/07/richard-feynman-sexism-and-changing.html?showComment=1406867095196
on “Richard Feynman, sexism and changing perceptions of a scientific icon”Submitted Interpreting Kafka’s Metamorphosis in the Digital Age as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Bottom-Up vs. Top-Down Drug Discovery as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The unstoppable Moore hits the immovable Eroom as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why it's hard to explain drug discovery to physicists as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted A new paper on kinase inhibitor discovery is not an AI breakthrough as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Carl Sagan's 1995 prediction of our technocratic dystopia as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted On AlphaGo, chemical synthesis and the rise of the intuition machines as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The beauty and clarity of Paul Dirac's prose as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
