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388 years ago, Galileo worked out why human giants can't exist

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/388-years-ago-galileo-worked-out-why-human-giants-cant-exist-and-explained-a-law-of-nature/
10•beardyw•44m ago

Comments

burlesona•21m ago
I’d heard this before, but it’s a fun reminder of how, in a sense, the laws of physics depend on what size you are. (Or rather, which laws have the most impact depends on the size of objects in question)

Note that if you disable JavaScript you can read this without the nag wall.

tofuziggy•20m ago
I'm not sure about this... for pure shear or tension load the strength scales by the square of the diameter, so increasing beam "linear size" by 10 gives only 100x strength, but our beam-bones would usually fail in bending, not in shear, where the strength scales by a factor of 10,000x (stress = (bending Moment x beam radius) / (Area Moment of Inertia of beam cross section), where the Area moment of inertia is a function of cross section diameter^4) And don't we already know that giant dinosaurs existed?
vivekd•18m ago
I don't know how convinced I am. First there were dinosaurs in the past, the brachiosaurus was 4 x as big as an elephant and there are probably yet undiscovered dinosaurs that were even bigger given discovery of partial fossils like the Sauroposeidon.

Also we know in the past there were dargonflys with wingspans greater than 2 feet and centipedes that grew as long as a car.

Your Estimate Isn't Off Because of Optimism or Inexperience

https://julienreszka.com/blog/your-estimate-isn-t-off-because-of-optimism-or-inexperience/
1•julienreszka•2m ago•0 comments

Splitting a Git Commit

https://blog.gnoack.org/post/git-history-split
1•signa11•3m ago•0 comments

Architectural Sins: Why We Keep Making Them and How We Can Stop

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6fS9-HsZeI
1•aoma_conference•3m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Visually Precise AI Tutoring on iOS

https://useknowable.ai/
3•samuelzxu•6m ago•1 comments

Ask HN: When you sell your company, do you receive the money with a normal wire?

1•supergilbert•6m ago•0 comments

QuoteBench: Matched Scores Can Hide Command-Path Failures

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13547
2•ninadwrites•8m ago•0 comments

The Risk in the US-Japan Yen Rescue

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yh18YXKMk3g
2•tcp_handshaker•8m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Quasicrystals Animation Playground with WebXR

https://hypnagogic-quasicrystals.github.io/
1•r34•11m ago•0 comments

Why are we having so many (or so few) earthquakes?

https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/why-are-we-having-so-many-or-so-few-earthquakes-has-naturally-occurring...
2•jahnu•14m ago•1 comments

So Who's Going to Buy All These Tokens?

https://horse.energy/who_buys_the_tokens.html
1•aakil•14m ago•0 comments

The Plasticity Thesis: How the Brain Learns to Be Conscious – PMC

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3110382/
1•lisper•14m ago•0 comments

Yadda 3.0.0: BDD in the Age of AI Agents

http://www.stephen-cresswell.com/2026/08/15/Yadda-3.0.0-BDD-in-the-Age-of-AI-Agents.html
1•scresswell•16m ago•1 comments

Generating Quantum Entanglement from Sunlight

https://opg.optica.org/captcha/(S(f1tudmft3lfosqlxanpvoxjl))/?guid=0DDB6A44-A99F-4451-B651-A095AB...
2•bookofjoe•16m ago•0 comments

Texas Court Locks Luxembourg-Based Adult Website's Domain

https://thetexasinsider.com/texas-court-locks-adult-websites-domain-after-company-ignores-state-a...
1•ColinWright•16m ago•0 comments

The Next Global Economic Crisis Could Be Made in China

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/next-global-economic-crisis-made-china-michael-froman
1•ericmay•16m ago•0 comments

Adversarial Creation and Detection of AI-Generated Social Bot Content

https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07219
1•Anon84•19m ago•0 comments

Vantage – open-source CS2 player intelligence from Steam, FACEIT and Leetify

https://github.com/k6w/vantage
2•regele•19m ago•0 comments

VictoriaMetrics: AI Policy

https://docs.victoriametrics.com/victoriametrics/contributing/index.html
1•tosh•23m ago•0 comments

Show HN: FrontStep v0.5.2

https://github.com/GiovanniCst/frontstep
3•J_cst•25m ago•0 comments

Does Alpha School Work for Regular Kids?

https://danmeyer.substack.com/p/does-alpha-school-work-for-regular
1•MrBuddyCasino•25m ago•0 comments

GLM-5.3 – The Official Desktop Auditor for Z.AI's Cyber-Engine

https://github.com/ZAI-GLM-5-3/glm-5.3
3•nioj•26m ago•0 comments

Babel: A skyscraper where every Wikipedia edit becomes a brick

https://babel.reppie.org/
1•meetpateltech•29m ago•0 comments

AI Software Development – What Does the Data Say?

https://codemanship.wordpress.com/2026/08/12/ai-software-development-what-does-the-data-say/
1•jesterpm•30m ago•0 comments

PriEco: Customize Your Results Ranking

https://prieco.net/blog/goggles
1•JojoYou•31m ago•0 comments

Traffic Modeling with Sumo: A Tutorial

https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.05982
1•teleforce•31m ago•0 comments

DeepSeek V4 Flash at 278 tok/s, full precision, no quantization

https://runinfra.ai/inference-api/deepseek-v4-flash
2•OsamaJaber•33m ago•0 comments

Could a computer scientist build a brain?

https://stankerstjens.github.io/could-a-computer-scientist-build-a-brain/
1•ogundipeore•33m ago•0 comments

The best way to sell a concentrated position at SpaceX

https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-best-way-to-sell-a-concentrated-position/
2•rwmj•33m ago•0 comments

The Gestalt Principles

https://ixdf.org/literature/topics/gestalt-principles
1•breppp•34m ago•0 comments

S.A.T.U.R.D.A.Y: serf-hosted speech to text AI assistant

https://github.com/GRVYDEV/S.A.T.U.R.D.A.Y
1•soupspaces•34m ago•0 comments