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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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Terry Pratchett and the Maggi Soup Adverts (2011)
Back in the 90s (starting with Moving Pictures) Terry Pratchett (yet to be knighted) changed his German publisher. A rather radical move in the market for someone who had been published by Heyne fo…
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Manifestos and Monopolies
Facebook has long had too much power, but Mark Zuckerberg’s expressed willingness to use said power for political ends means it’s time to consider countermeasures.
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Crony Beliefs
[Note: if you prefer audio, you can listen to this essay narrated by Grognor on his excellent podcast Second Enumerations . —Ed. ]
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What Amazon's ebook strategy really means
It seems to me that a lot of folks in the previous discussion don't really understand quite what makes Amazon so interesting—and threatening, for that matter—to the publishing industry.
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Things Economists Agree On
If we could get the American public to endorse all these propositions, I am sure their leaders would quickly follow, and public policy would be much improved. That is why economics education is so important.
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Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?
The two most intriguing developments in the recent evolution of the Microsoft Windows operating system are Windows System for Linux (WSL) and the porting of their Microsoft Edge browser to Ubuntu.
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The dark forest and the cozy web (2020)
An illustrated diagram exposing the inner layers of the dark and cozy web
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The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It? (1998)
Combining standard stories of biologists, astronomers, physicists, and social scientists would lead us to expect a much smaller filter than we observe. Thus one of these stories must be wrong. To find out who is wrong, and to inform our choices, we should study and reconsider all these areas. For example, we should…
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Scroogled (2007)
Cory Doctorow wrote this Creative Commons-licensed fiction story for Radar Online magazine .
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Richard Stallman on Steve Jobs
My intention is to make links only to publicly accessible, stable URLs. If you find a link to a page that requires subscription, please report that as you would report any other broken link.
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Google Search Is Dying
(There is good discussion on this article on Hacker News and Reddit)
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Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”
Last week, Microsoft announced the new AI-powered Bing: a search interface that incorporates a language model powered chatbot that can run searches for you and summarize the results, plus do …
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$1B of TSA Nude Body Scanners Made Worthless By Blog
This video is here to demonstrate that the TSA’s insistence that the nude body scanner program is effective and necessary is nothing but a fraud, just like their claims that the program is sa…
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If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing
20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired . I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:
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Things you notice when you quit the news (2016)
I grew up believing that following the news makes you a better citizen. Eight years after having quit, that idea now seems ridiculous—that consuming a particularly unimaginative information produ...
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Everyone knows all the apps on your phone
Until a few years ago, any app you installed on an Android device could see all other apps on your phone without your permission.
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Who’s behind the “reopen” domain surge?
The past few weeks have seen a large number of new domain registrations beginning with the word “reopen” and ending with U.S. city or state names. The largest number of them were created just hours after President Trump sent a series of all-caps tweets urging citizens to “liberate” themselves from new gun control…
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Credit card debt collection
Credit card debt is the waste stream of consumer finance. The debt collection industry ends up being sordid, for complex structural and microeconomic reasons.
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In Defense of Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman has had a rough month. This article is a decent summary of the events. In short: Stallman made some technically-correct-but-utterly-tactless comments on a private mailing list, most…
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Seven years on, what do we know about the disappearance of flight MH370? (2021)
“Good night, Malaysian three seven zero.”
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Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight
A vibe coding thought exercise on what it might look like for LLMs to scour human historical data at scale and in retrospect.
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Stop pushing the web forward
Fair warning. You’re going to hate this one. I want to stop pushing the web forward for a while. I want a moratorium on new browser features for about a year or so.
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The Demise of Scientific American
Scott’s foreword One week ago, E. O. Wilson—the legendary naturalist and conservationist, and man who was universally acknowledged to know more about ants than anyone else in human hist…
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A Social Filesystem
Formats over apps.
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What is money, anyway?
Editor’s Note: This topic is now comprehensively covered in my book, Broken Money. Money is a surprisingly complex subject. People spend their lives seeking money, and in some ways it seems so straightforward, and yet what humanity has defined as money has changed significantly over the centuries. How could something…