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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
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Anatomy of a credit card rewards program
Credit card rewards are mostly funded out of interchange, a fee paid by businesses to accept cards.
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How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler
In the last three months, tech giants have censored political speech and journalism to manipulate U.S. politics, while liberals, with virtual unanimity, have cheered.
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Top Books on Amazon Based on Links in Hacker News Comments
This visualization shows the top 30 books ranked by total number of links to Amazon in Hacker News comments from Oct 2006 to Oct 2015.
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NSA, NIST, and post-quantum crypto: my second lawsuit against the US government
The Black Chamber was founded by the U.S. Army and the U.S. State Department in 1919. The Secretary of State terminated funding in 1929, famously writing that "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail."
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Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)
This blog is intended to be a place to share ideas and results that are too weird, incomplete, or off-topic to turn into an academic paper, but that I think may be important. Let me know what you think! Contact links to the left.
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I fought the PayPal and I won
Payment processors hostile to freedom of expression hate me for this one weird trick!!
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GDPR: Don't Panic
In another week the GDPR , or the General Data Protection Regulation will become enforceable and it appears that unlike any other law to date this particular one has the interesting side effect of causing mass hysteria in the otherwise rational tech sector.
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WeWTF
I’ve started nine firms and I’m, generously, 3-4-2 (win-lose-tie). In retrospect, and I think about this a lot, the only reliable forward-looking indicator of our firm’s success or failure was … timing. Specifically, the part of the economic cycle at founding. The firms we started in recessions had an easier time…
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Advertising Is a Cancer on Society
A detailed explanation of why I keep saying that advertising is a cancer on modern society.
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Get your loved ones off Facebook
I originally wrote this for my friends and family in 2015, to explain why the latest Facebook privacy policy is really harmful. It’s since been read b
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Firefox removes core product support for RSS/Atom feeds
TL;DR: from Firefox 64 onwards, RSS/Atom feed support will be handled via add-ons, rather than in-product.
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Enough with the dead butterflies
We all have pet peeves, even though there's a lot going on in the world that makes them pretty insignificant. While acknowledging that there are many more
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Shedding Light on the “Black Box of Inappropriateness”
From Creepy Comments to Sexual Assault I’m shaking as I write this, not quite knowing where to start. As I’m sure Susan Fowler and Niniane, Susan & Leiti probably did, I’ve struggled long and h…
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The 2016 Election
I am endorsing Hillary Clinton for president. I've never endorsed a presidential candidate before, but I'm making an exception this year, because this election is exceptional. Donald Trump...
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How I Pranked My Roommate with Eerily Targeted Facebook Ads
Ghost Influence by Brian Swichkow2014343 points46 commentscited by 8Tech Industry & Business details
This is the chronicle of the most epic retaliation and how I pranked my roommate with targeted Facebook Ads to the point of complete paranoia and delusion.
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Fuck the Cloud (2009)
This will be the last time I go along this area of discussion for a while because it’s just going to get very old very quickly. But I wanted, in one place, a quick manifesto/rant about this p…
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We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
( This is the text of a talk I delivered at the Next Frontiers Applied Fiction Day in Stuttgart on Friday November 10th, 2023. Note: early draft, contains some typos, I'll fix them next week when I get home. )
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Fields medalist Tim Gowers: Elsevier — my part in its downfall
The Dutch publisher Elsevier publishes many of the world’s best known mathematics journals, including Advances in Mathematics, Comptes Rendus, Discrete Mathematics, The European Journal of Co…
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The Collapse of Complex Business Models
I gave a talk last year to a group of TV executives gathered for an annual conference. From the Q&A after, it was clear that for them, the question wasn’t whether the internet was going to alter their business, but about the mode and tempo of that alteration. Against that background, though, they were worried
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The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations
The whole OpenAI/Hugging Face story in plain English
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South Korea’s online security dead end
Websites in South Korea often require installation of “security applications.” Not only do these mandatory applications not help security, way too often they introduce issues.
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An Investigation of the Facts Behind Columbia's U.S. News Ranking
Michael Thaddeus Professor of Mathematics mt324@columbia.edu thaddeus@michaelthaddeus.org February 2022, revised March 2022
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The Adolescence of Technology
Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI