https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/cond-mat_9512055/Collected HN comments and submissions linking this paper.enMon, 02 Nov 2026 11:16:22 GMThttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44697614urn:hackerpapers:mention:cond-mat_9512055:44697614Sat, 26 Jul 2025 23:08:03 GMT<p>Write them, they can use all the complaints they can get. My first paper was https://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/9512055v1 which eventually got published in Physical Review E but the abstract for a talk I gave at the March Meeting of the APS caught the eye of a reporter at Science News so I had the cover story one week, I think before the real publication. The magazine printed a photo I took of Ron Maimon crumpling paper on the sofa of my office with an apparatus that I invented. Ron never completed his PhD on string theory but he eventually became a notorious 9/11 &quot;truther&quot; and conspiracy…</p><p><a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/cond-mat_9512055/">Paper and discussion history</a>. A mention is not an endorsement.</p>cond-mathttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42976987urn:hackerpapers:mention:cond-mat_9512055:42976987Fri, 07 Feb 2025 20:18:30 GMT<p>Exactly, the thing that is &quot;universal&quot; about &quot;universal power laws&quot; is that the evidence is weak for them, not because people did a bad experiment, but because they pulled a data analysis method out of their ass. My one regret of my scientific career was this paper https://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/9512055 where my coauthor asked me &quot;you want to be a theoretician, do you have an explanation?&quot; but I didn&#x27;t. (I did have some ideas that would have involved knowing more about the structure of the balls, doing more experiments, to give any real answer) Actually I had reservations about the analysis…</p><p><a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/cond-mat_9512055/">Paper and discussion history</a>. A mention is not an endorsement.</p>cond-mathttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39048883urn:hackerpapers:mention:cond-mat_9512055:39048883Thu, 18 Jan 2024 22:38:33 GMT<p>These guys have a systematic methodology for doing meta-analysis in health https://www.cochrane.org/ The process starts with doing a literature search and then culling low-quality results which is almost always most of them because most studies in health have too small of a sample size, lack controls, and have other basic flaws. I saw one the other day where they found 80 studies but could only include two in the analysis. Physics has its own hall of shame. It&#x27;s quite likely that a large fraction of high energy physics is &quot;not even wrong&quot; in that there&#x27;s not any evidence that the universe has…</p><p><a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/cond-mat_9512055/">Paper and discussion history</a>. A mention is not an endorsement.</p>cond-mat