Top all-time · #95
Stephen Wolfram
Personal blog · writings.stephenwolfram.comscienceai
Stephen Wolfram's personal blog at writings.stephenwolfram.com covers science and ai. Since 2019, 389 different Hacker News readers have linked it 571 times, most often “What Is ChatGPT Doing and Why Does It Work? (2023)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-23, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 14 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Stephen Wolfram's long essays on computation, physics and AI, and his productivity and walking-desk setup. Commenters cite them as sources and call specific pieces fascinating and excellent.
- Recommended for · 14 comments
- Called 'fascinating' and 'excellent' (ML articles), 'the best work I've seen by far', and 'a good start' on ChatGPT.
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.
Articles by Stephen Wolfram covering artificial intelligence, computational science and computational thinking, data science, education, future and historical perspectives, sciences, software design, technology, Wolfram products, more.
Most-linked posts?
- What Is ChatGPT Doing and Why Does It Work? (2023)56 people · 65 mentions · first linked 2023-02-14
- Seeking the productive life: Some details of my personal infrastructure (2019)49 people · 54 mentions · first linked 2019-11-05
- The Wolfram Physics Project26 people · 29 mentions · first linked 2020-04-14
- ChatGPT Gets Its “Wolfram Superpowers”14 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2023-03-23
- The Concept of the Ruliad14 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2021-11-11
- The Personal Analytics of My Life (2012)10 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2020-02-08
- Wolfram Alpha as the Way to Bring Computational Knowledge Superpowers to ChatGPT9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2023-01-09
- Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace (2015)8 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2020-04-18
- Combinators: A Centennial View (2020)8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2020-12-06
- Remembering the Improbable Life of Ed Fredkin (1934–2023)7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2023-08-22
What Hacker News says?
I don't care about analyzing the data afterwards. When I open the notebook and see that I've only had one glass of water, it motivates me to drink another, until I get around 8 in one day. I've read https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-ana... , have used Seinfeld calendar apps, and bought productivity tools... all with no luck. I have an addictive personality so I could easily sit in front of the…
Comment linking /2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/
on “My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file”Submitted The Wolfram Physics Project as a story · 588 points
HN discussionInteresting. Stephen Wolfram also wears a camera that snaps pictures every 20 seconds for special events. This is quite a read: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-prod...
Comment linking /2019/02/seeking-the-productive-life-some-details-of-my-personal-infrastructure/
on “Gordon Bell has died”Submitted On the Nature of Time as a story · 361 points
HN discussionTake a computer that can run the biggest LLM available today. It can also run any smaller LLM as well. It can also run software that isn't an LLM at all. Brains and LLMs are not at all equivalent as LLMs lack a stateful physical form while brains are very stateful. As you said once the brain is no longer maintained properly by the body it stops and transitions to a non-functional state that can be reversed. That isn…
Comment linking /2021/03/what-is-consciousness-some-new-perspectives-from-our-physics-project/
on “DeepSeek v4.1 Flash”Submitted We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute as a story · 255 points
HN discussionSome, like Stephen Wolfram, say that the universe must exists, that non-existance is not possible. https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/04/why-does-the-uni...
Comment linking /2021/04/why-does-the-universe-exist-some-perspectives-from-our-physics-project/
on “Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful”Submitted What's Going on in Machine Learning? Some Minimal Models as a story · 239 points
HN discussionFunny, on same day there is a post from this guy that seems to think the nature of reality is computation. That the fundamental structure is computation and cellular automata. Maybe it isn't 'machine learning' but definitely the lines are blurring between physics and other fields of information. https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2024/10/on-the-nature-of... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41782534
Comment linking /2024/10/on-the-nature-of-time/
on “Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]”Submitted Wolfram Compute Services as a story · 230 points
HN discussionReminds me somewhat similar - CEO of Wolfram developed a nice way of record keeping: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-prod... By the way, is there, by chance, a "note taking/indexing tool from photo"? I'd like to be able to take a photo of an title/abstract of computer science paper with my phone. And then be able to find it, by approximate date and keywords. (I use Android. Seems like somethi…
Comment linking /2019/02/seeking-the-productive-life-some-details-of-my-personal-infrastructure/
on “Building personal search infrastructure for your knowledge and code”Submitted What If We Had Bigger Brains? Imagining Minds Beyond Ours as a story · 208 points
HN discussionI agree visualizing neural networks is challenging. The flexibility and consequences of network connections is also confusing. If you decide to go down that route again, the best work I've seen by far is the recent one by Stephen Wolfram: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2024/08/whats-really-goi...
Comment linking /2024/08/whats-really-going-on-in-machine-learning-some-minimal-models/
on “Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?”Submitted Mathematica 14 as a story · 201 points
HN discussion> I still have bets on this all being a massive game of life. You might be right! https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-h...
Comment linking /2020/04/finally-we-may-have-a-path-to-the-fundamental-theory-of-physics-and-its-beautiful/
on “Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’”Submitted Seeking the productive life: Some details of my personal infrastructure (2019) as a story · 199 points
HN discussionAs much as the guy can be annoying, the associated "Project Announcement" is a fascinating 20,000-word-ish article. [1] I've long assumed that the basic structure of the universe must be some kind of graph, simply because it's the most elementary structure there seems to be, and so easily gives rise to dimensionality. So seeing someone try to tackle this bottom-up and see if it can ultimately give rise to quantum me…
Comment linking /2020/04/finally-we-may-have-a-path-to-the-fundamental-theory-of-physics-and-its-beautiful/
on “The Wolfram Physics Project”Submitted Who Can Understand the Proof? A Window on Formalized Mathematics as a story · 190 points
HN discussionWolfram’s header image apart from the article is available in light and dark variants that can be pinch-zoomed more easily: http://www.wolframphysics.org/visual-summary/ Based on this image alone, having not yet read the article, it looks like he’s taken his prior insights on cellular automata (Conway’s Game type stuff) and advanced them forward to quarks and Feynman diagrams. I typically have a very rough time with…
Comment linking /data/uploads/2020/04/0409img126.png
on “The Wolfram Physics Project”Submitted How inevitable is the concept of numbers? as a story · 182 points
HN discussionThese kind of hand wavey statements like “practice,” “grok,” and “nonlinear its capabilities will be” are not very constructive as they don’t have solid meaning wrt language models. So, here's my hypothesis, as someone who is adjacent ML but haven't trained DNNs directly: We don't understand how they work, because we didn't build them. They built themselves. At face value this can be seen as an almost spiritual posi…
Comment linking /2024/08/whats-really-going-on-in-machine-learning-some-minimal-models/
on “GPT-5 is behind schedule”Submitted The Most-Used Mathematical Algorithm Idea in History (2016) as a story · 181 points
HN discussionYou can't work and concentrate while running. You can only do it walking. Check out Stephen Wolfram's setup: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-prod... From his blog post: > But while standing may be better than sitting, I like to at least start my day with something more active, and for more than a decade I’ve been making sure to walk for a couple of hours every morning. But how can I be produc…
Comment linking /2019/02/seeking-the-productive-life-some-details-of-my-personal-infrastructure/
on “I built a lay-down desk”Submitted Where Did Combinators Come From? Hunting the Story of Moses Schönfinkel as a story · 173 points
HN discussionI thought Wolfram's version of this resulted in some interesting analysis: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-ana...
Comment linking /2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/
on “I put my whole life into a single database”Submitted Seeking the Productive Life: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure (2019) as a story · 165 points
HN discussionhttps://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-prod... this article goes into some details about Stephen Wolfram's walking laptop setup.
Comment linking /2019/02/seeking-the-productive-life-some-details-of-my-personal-infrastructure/
on “On the link between great thinking and obsessive walking”Submitted What Is ChatGPT Doing and Why Does It Work? (2023) as a story · 149 points
HN discussionI don't see that this follows. It doesn't seem materially different than knowing that U always follows Q, and that J is always followed by a vowel in "legal" English language words. https://content.wolfram.com/uploads/sites/43/2023/02/sw02142... from https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-... I imagine it's technically possible to do this in a piecewise manner that doesn't "understand" the large…
Comment linking /2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/
on “GPT-4”Submitted Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica as a story · 149 points
HN discussion
