271
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 1,213 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
272
Reasons for Speaking Out on Sex and Gender Issues (2020)
Warning: The below content is not appropriate for children. Please check with an adult before you read this page. To go back to the children’s page, please click here. This isn’t an easy piece to write, for reasons that will shortly become clear, but I know it’s time to explain myself on an issue surrounded […]
273
Archiving URLs (2019)
Archiving the Web, because nothing lasts forever: statistics, online archive services, extracting URLs automatically from browsers, and creating a daemon to regularly back up URLs to multiple sources.
274
How popular is Donald Trump?
Silver Bulletin approval ratings for President Trump — and all presidents since Truman.
275
Pro-Neutrality, Anti-Title II
Any regulation, including those around net neutrality, should be put to a cost-benefit analysis. In this case regulation advocates come up short.
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What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It?
Remember Galton’s experiments on visual imagination? Some people just don’t have it. And they never figured it out. They assumed no one had it, and when people talked about being able t…
278
Saint IGNUcius
Stallman is a saint in the Church of Emacs—Saint IGNUcius. I bless your computer, my child! (jpeg 31k, photo by Wouter van Oortmerssen)
279
Chat log exhibits from Twitter v. Musk case
This is a scan/OCR of Exhibits H and J from the Twitter v. Musk case, with some of the conversations de-interleaved and of course converted from a fuzzy scan to text to make for easier reading.
280
Radicalizing the Romanceless
[PLEASE NOTE: This post is from 2014.] [Content note: Gender, relationships, feminism, manosphere. Quotes, without endorsing and with quite a bit of mocking, mean arguments by terrible people. Some…
281
Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs
These policies are not just dumb in retrospect; typically there were people who understood a lot about such policies and who had good reasons to disapprove of them beforehand. It seems hard to imagine such policies being adopted nearly as often if everyone knew what such "experts" knew about their consequences. Thus…
282
[REPOST] The Non-Libertarian FAQ
[This is a repost of the Non-Libertarian FAQ (aka “Why I Hate Your Freedom”), which I wrote about five years ago and which used to be hosted on my website. It no longer completely refle…
283
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect
The Mortal Passage Trilogy: An Epic in Four Stories is now available. That link leads to Amazon, but you can find it on iTunes, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and elsewhere too.
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Hacker News Parody Thread (2013)
This page is intended to be a humorous parody of Hacker News . It is not in any way affiliated with Hacker News. The page's theme and layout are based on the original site. The usernames (with two exceptions) are intended to be fictitious.
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If you've nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear
Since 1851 Amsterdam had a registry that recorded the following innocent pieces of data about the residents: Name, Date of birth, Address, Marital Status, Parents, Profession, Religion, Previous Addresses and Date of Death if deceased. For many years this system served well and was kept meticulously up to date.
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"A computer can never be held accountable"
This legendary page from an internal IBM training in 1979 could not be more appropriate for our new age of AI. A computer can never be held accountable Therefore a …
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Unnecessariat
I remember AIDS. I’m older than you probably think I am, and I remember what AIDS in America meant in the eighties, when William F. Buckley suggested all “carriers” be tattooed, a…
291
When McDonalds Came to Denmark
Every few months, a prominent person or publication points out that McDonalds workers in Denmark receive $22 per hour, 6 weeks of vacation, and sick pay. This compensation comes on top of the general slate of social benefits in Denmark, which includes child allowances, health care, child care, paid leave, retirement…
292
Reasons Not to Use Apple (2018)
Apple reportedly had objections to what Jon Stewart said in his video program — it canceled the show after he had criticized China, and something the article describes as "AI". (It could be that what he criticized was actually large language models, which may be an important issue but are not "intelligence" .)
293
The Gentle Singularity
We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be. Robots...
294
The Gentle Seduction (1989)
He worked with computers; she worked with trees, and the flowers that took hold on the sides of the Mountain.
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Hellbanned from Hacker News
Yesterday I submitted a post on Hacker News out of frustration at moderators pedantically changing post titles. After quickly rising to the number two spot on the front page with 482 points and 37 comments, the post was deleted by a moderator, presumably the operator of the site, Paul Graham.
297
The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook
Facebook is a great service. I have a profile , and so does nearly everyone I know under the age of 60.
298
Geek Social Fallacies (2003)
Within the constellation of allied hobbies and subcultures collectively known as geekdom, one finds many social groups bent under a crushing burden of dysfunction, social drama, and general interp
299
Weathering Software Winter (2022)
This is a blog post based on a transcript of a talk by Devine on November 26th 2022. Watch the video version on (YouTube). The slideshow presentation was made using Adelie .
300
Amish Hackers (2009)
[Translations: Japanese] The Amish have the undeserved reputation of being luddites, of people who refuse to employ new technology. It’s well known the strictest of them don’t use electricity, or automobiles, but rather farm with manual tools and ride in … Continue reading →