Top all-time · #23
Scott Aaronson
Personal blog · scottaaronson.comsciencemathwriting
Scott Aaronson's personal blog at scottaaronson.com covers science, math and writing. Since 2007, 833 different Hacker News readers have linked it 1,522 times, most often “Who Can Name the Bigger Number?”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Sometimes recommended · 10 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Scott Aaronson's blog and papers on quantum computing and complexity theory, often as sources in disputes like P vs NP and quantum supremacy, and as explanations of hard ideas.
- Recommended for · 10 comments
- Called fun, accessible, a great lecture and 'nailed it'; one commenter very much recommends the blog.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Who Can Name the Bigger Number?32 people · 34 mentions · first linked 2007-08-28
- Who Can Name the Bigger Number? (1999)32 people · 33 mentions · first linked 2017-10-24
- Quantum mechanics as a generalization of probability (2007)28 people · 33 mentions · first linked 2007-11-26
- PHYS771 Lecture 9: Quantum (2007)25 people · 29 mentions · first linked 2018-01-07
- May reason trump the Trump in all of us (Shtetl-Optimized, Scott Aaronson)25 people · 25 mentions · first linked 2007-06-21
- Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity (2011) [pdf]24 people · 37 mentions · first linked 2017-08-24
- D-Wave: Truth finally starts to emerge20 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2013-05-16
- Quantum supremacy, now with BosonSampling20 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2017-11-13
- Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity (2011) [pdf]19 people · 25 mentions · first linked 2011-09-06
- S. Aaronson. NP-complete Problems and Physical Reality [pdf]17 people · 20 mentions · first linked 2009-06-09
What Hacker News says?
The 'scientific method' is not something that can be reduced to formal reasoning. Bayesian inference is a type of formal reasoning for making predictions, and as such, is a mathematical 'toy model' that doesn't correspond to the real universe. Yudkowsky worships pure mathematics, but he always had it 'arse backwards'. It's not pure mathematics that's the ideal, it's numerical and iterated methods and heuristics (cog…
Comment linking /blog/?p=3875
on ““I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL””Submitted First they came for the Iranians as a story · 1000 points
HN discussionHey, I wrote about monoamine oxidase inhibitors on Scott Aaronson's blog a few months ago: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4933 Basically, there's is an international shortage for one of the most effective treatment for severe depression because of an unfortunate series of events, the drug's long history as a generic and the manufacturers' willingness to replace the drug class, and constantly produce new paten…
Comment linking /blog/?p=4933
on “The Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company”Submitted Scott’s Supreme Quantum Supremacy FAQ as a story · 603 points
HN discussionNo: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3482 .
Comment linking /blog/?p=3482
on “Keybase launches encrypted Git”Submitted The Kolmogorov option as a story · 537 points
HN discussionNo idea about which is more likely, but I'm rooting for Yang-Mills. It's absurd that fundamental physics has formulated its most precise currently known theory way back in the seventies and since then, even a tiny subset of it can't be proven to be actually well-defined. If we got out of that morass then something good would come out of this at least. Of course, as with all of those, it's about the broader program,…
Comment linking /papers/npcomplete.pdf
on “On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem”Submitted Knuth on Huang's Sensitivity Proof: “I've got the proof down to one page” [pdf] as a story · 462 points
HN discussionScott Alexander has some examples of that in his post: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=418 For example: > Why are even some affluent parts of the world running out of fresh water? Because if they weren’t, they’d keep watering their lawns until they were.
Comment linking /blog/?p=418
on “The web sucks if you have a slow connection”Submitted Eigenmorality as a story · 439 points
HN discussionI think that there are a lot of assumptions in that chain. When you or I ask why did we make a decision X we can formulate answers but, for my account, I don't have access to all of the components of my thinking - I cannot articulate what I feel is really going on. I think that randomness in the universe is very hard to account for too - I was impressed by an essay that Scott Aaronson wrote about this : https://www.…
Comment linking /papers/giqtm3.pdf
on “Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI”Submitted P vs. NP as a story · 390 points
HN discussionFor anyone interested in the consistency of CH and Axiom of Choice: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4974 And (of course) the HN discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24954695
Comment linking /blog/?p=4974
on “What Gödel Discovered”Submitted Google, D-Wave, and the case of the factor-10^8 speedup as a story · 312 points
HN discussion> Quantom computing cannot break all of crypto. Correct (except for the spelling of "Quantum"). > Anything based on P!=NP is believed to be secure against quantom computing, and there are several encryption methods backed by P!=NP Incorrect, well mostly. The deal is that there are problems that can be done in "polynomial time" (how long it takes is not exponential in the size of they key) for a normal computer (or p…
Comment linking /blog/
on “N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption”Submitted I will not log in to your website as a story · 302 points
HN discussionTheoretical physicist Roger Penrose is a proponent of this view, but theoretical computer scientist Scott Aaronson presents a rebuttal of his points [1]. Another article claims that the distance between synapses is two orders of magnitude too big for quantum mechanical effects to be effective, which seems like a plausible rebuttal to me [2]. [1] http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec10.5.html [2] http://www.csi…
Comment linking /democritus/lec10.5.html
on “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks”Submitted How Shor's Algorithm works (2007) as a story · 293 points
HN discussionHere are two other blogs I found through the same (now unknown) source: - https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/ - https://jasoncollins.blog/ Though they've gotten a bit more topical and/or political in recent times.
Comment linking /blog/
on “Still alive”Submitted NSA in P/poly: The Power of Precomputation as a story · 286 points
HN discussionNo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqVVtaWd8Pw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUJfjRoxCbk (Or as gnaritas said.) (Also useful: http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/default.html )
Comment linking /democritus/default.html
on “Gravity waves from Big Bang detected”Submitted Quantum supremacy: the gloves are off as a story · 275 points
HN discussionFun discussion to be found at: http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/bignumbers.html
Comment linking /writings/bignumbers.html
on “A cave in Romania that was sealed for 5.5M years”Submitted D-Wave: Truth finally starts to emerge as a story · 267 points
HN discussionThank you, that is a very intuitive explanation. You've probably read Scott Aaronson's Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity? [0]. This seems like the perfect area to apply a lot of the questions he brings up. That's what I was looking for as I skimmed through the paper. Maybe that's what idlewords was talking about as well. [0] http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf
Comment linking /papers/philos.pdf
on “Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People”Submitted Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation as a story · 251 points
HN discussionIt's actually educational and was cowritten by Scott Aaronson, who has a great lecture that explains the idea of "quantum mechanics as complex probabilities": https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec9.html
Comment linking /democritus/lec9.html
on “The “Talk””Submitted What does the NSA think of academic cryptographers? as a story · 229 points
HN discussionScott Aaronson, co-author of the comic, is the director of the Quantum Information Center at UT Austin, and has a number of publications about quantum computing. His website has more qualifications: https://www.scottaaronson.com/ .
Comment linking /
on “The “Talk””Submitted Quantum supremacy, now with BosonSampling as a story · 223 points
HN discussion
