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Comment by Cerium | Hacker News Reader

This comes up on HN every now and then, it is how I learned about low background steel. If this is new to you, you may also enjoy reading about the cesium content of wine: https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/07/19/141390/fukushima...

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Is there a particular trigger for this post?

Is this a case of someone stumbling into the concept and wanting to share it with the world? Is there some trend in SV around low-background steel right now?

Genuinely curious about the phenomenon of posts around topics that have a great deal of understanding and aren’t necessarily trending in the general news cycle.

There was a post a week or so ago where low-background steel was discussed in the comments. I can't find it on Google though. Probably someone saw that and either made a calendar reminder for a few days out to post it or had it in their open tab backlog.

Edit: I'm pretty sure it was the knife steel post.

If I had to guess, the moderators curate certain technical discussions to the top.

But I’d wager that Reddit curates their front page too. There’s no way an organic algorithm is populating the front page.

I saw it linked from the comments on a Tweet by Karpathy and found it intellectually curious.

> By posting GPT generated text we’re polluting the data for its future versions

https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1284660899198820352

You seem to have gotten your replies mixed up. This looks like it's for the GPT "Bitcoin" thread?

No, low-background steel is mentioned in the replies. It's similar in the sense that GPT-3 generated text is going to contaminate the data we collect from now on.

Ah, yeah, that makes sense. My bad.

One of the latest xkcd comics mentioned low background steel. I assume that is the reason

It could be as simple as OP being one of [today's lucky 10,000](https://xkcd.com/1053/).

The 75th anniversary of the first nuclear bomb test was just a few days ago, on July 16th. It's been in the news a bit lately, and this topic is related.

Low background lead was recently mentioned on xkcd[0]. Maybe that circled back to HN?

[0] https://xkcd.com/2321/

There was a recent post on the trinity test

Someone going on a binge from that, through discovering how Kodak found out about nukes from film and low background steel isnt a huge stretch either

OP answered in a sibling comment, but might additionally be interesting to know why a repost like this gets upvoted: I upvoted it because I didn't know of it (this is the first time I see it) and I wasn't aware that there is that much radiation lingering from tests decades ago, which was interesting to me.

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